Courtesy Palgrave/Macmillan

This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.

The photograph on the cover of Andrew Kolin’s book is all too familiar.

Police officers dressed in riot gear, gripping batons, square off against protesters in what appears to be a tense situation that is on the brink of turning violent. Although the photograph was shot during a protest on the streets of Pittsburgh 2009, it’s an image that is now seared into the public’s consciousness following the brutal crackdowns by local law enforcement on the Occupy movement in Oakland and New York City last month.

Important questions have been raised about what role, if any, the federal government has played in dismantling the Occupy encampments around the country and what the protesters and civil liberties groups say is ultimately an attempt to stifle dissent.

While we wait for those answers, Kolin, a political science professor at Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York, has done a masterful job of tracing the origins of the “political repression of mass-based movements” and the rise of the “police state” in his exhaustively researched book, “State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush.” (Click here to read an excerpt.)

In an interview with Truthout, Kolin said, all police states, “and Germany in the [1930s] is the classic example,” develop by “crushing democracy.”

The goal of a police state, Kolin said, is to “modernize state functions and concentrate control over society through the creation of specialized departments.”

It was Watergate, Kolin said, that became a “dress rehearsal” for the police state under which US citizens currently live.

“There was cause for optimism with the Church Committee hearings exposing the criminality of the Nixon administration,” Kolin said. “But again, as I discuss in my book, the reform that came out of the Church Committee that actually made a police state more possible was the creation of the secret [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] court, which for the first time, made government surveillance legal. Then, president after president sought to reassert their power post-Watergate in domestic and foreign policy.”

In the introduction to “State Power,” Kolin explains how the national security policies implemented by Bush and embraced by Obama, such as the Patriot Act, which authorized the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, were the culmination of extraordinary tension between state power and democracy dating back to the founding of the Republic.

The expansion of state power over the course of US history came at the expense of democracy. As state power grew, there developed a disconnect between the theory and practice of democracy in the United States. Ever-greater state power meant it became more and more absolute. This resulted in a government that directed its energies and resources toward silencing those who dared question the state’s authority. Such questioning of state power had emanated as a response to mass-based political movements striving to further democracy with an increase in freedom, especially for the downtrodden. This put mass movements in direct confrontation with the elite politics of policy makers. So, over time, as the US government continued on its course of seeking to increase state power by extending ever-greater control over people and territory, it also meant it worked toward a goal to diminish mass-based political movements.

This is an important history lesson, especially for the generation who became politically aware during Bush’s presidency and view the crackdown on the Occupy protests as somewhat unprecedented.

Kolin argues that the roots of such “political repression” can be traced back to the end of the Revolutionary War, beginning with “the conquest of North America and by the start of the twentieth century,” when the US government began to implement policies “intended to eliminate democracy inside and outside the United States.”

“It is no coincidence that as the state enacted measures to crush democracy, there appeared federal agencies with an antidemocractic mission…,” Kolin writes. “Nonetheless, political repression ebbed and flowed, often determined by historical factors and the ability of progressive movements to affect social change during periods of unrest.”

Kolin said the leaderless Occupy movement, like political uprisings in the US that preceded it, has a simple goal: “the excluded seeking to be included, which is the one thing standing in the way of mass democracy.”

“It’s eerily disturbing how history is once again repeating itself,” Kolin said, as he watches law enforcement, which he noted is beginning to look increasingly “like a civilian branch of the military,” and local government officials are “trampling upon the rights of citizens and doing so in ways that are becoming more violent,” in order to “repress dissent.”

A report published earlier this week by Business Insider may help explain why local police forces are beginning to appear more and more militarized.

Credit a “little-known endeavor called the ‘1033 Program‘ that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone,” Business Insider reported.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

One member of Congress, however, is speaking up about police tactics used against protesters. On Tuesday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to launch a full-scale investigation “into law enforcement activities surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests and similar events in other cities, to determine whether the unlawful use of force, or the unlawful targeting of individuals [via surveillance] based on their participation in constitutionally protected activities, occurred.”

Still, Kolin is highly critical of the Obama administration for remaining completely silent as disturbing images of peaceful protesters, such as the University of California, Davis, students who were pepper sprayed by campus police as they sat with their arms linked, flashed across television screens and went viral on the Internet.

“We don’t want a government that is representative of the one percent,” Kolin said. “But the silence by this administration speaks volumes and indicates, to me, that this is a movement the government wants to crush.”

However, “in spite of political repression on the federal, state, and local levels, for much of the twentieth century,” Kolin writes in “State Power,” “many mass-based movements persisted for two reasons: one, they appealed to many Americans, and two, as political repression was mounted against these movements, eventually the government believed that the political crisis that triggered such movements had ended.”

Kolin admits that he had believed Obama would eventually “correct the self-destruction of the Bush police state through piecemeal reforms” after he was sworn into office nearly three year ago.

Instead, Obama’s executive power grab went further. To cite one example, the president authorized the targeted assassination of a US citizen living in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was suspected of inspiring failed terrorist attacks against the US and being a top member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki, despite his US citizenship, was not entitled to due process under the Constitution, the administration concluded.

Kolin said Awlaki’s assassination underscores one of the problems with a two-party system: Democrats and Republicans “fall in line when it comes down to certain issues.”

“Democrats march in lockstep with their Republican counterparts,” Kolin said. “We saw that during the Bush administration and we’re seeing it again when it comes to economic and national security issues under Obama. I don’t see much difference between the two parties. I really don’t. Obama has proven to be just like his predecessors. He’s interested in the powers he inherited from Bush and the new powers he acquired. And he continues to fulfill the wishes of Wall Street and the financial backers who bankrolled his election.”

Kolin said the struggle for economic democracy will form the basis of his future research.

“One cannot have political democracy in the absence of economic democracy,” he said. “By that, I mean that without worker control of the workplace, political decisions will continue to be made by the economic elite.”

In the meantime, he believes the erosion of the police state, where “mass based democracy, which rules for the masses, not political and economic elites,” is still a possiblity and he sees the Occupy movement playing a crucial role.

“Keep in mind that police states are by their inherent nature dysfunctional,” Kolin said. “The Occupy movement is hope of a return to mass democracy as a countervailing force to the police state and to it’s possible breakdown.”

The United States is outspoken about human rights violations happening across the globe, but what about the ones America itself is guilty of? Investigative journalist Jason Leopold talks to RT about the conditions at Gitmo that America isn’t acknowledging.

JTF Guantanamo photo by Army Sgt. Joseph Scozzari

With the death of Osama bin Laden, there is a perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to bring to an end the decade-long “War on Terror” by withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The justification for both the invasion of Afghanistan (in October 2001) and the detention of prisoners in Guantánamo (which opened in January 2002) is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, just three days after the 9/11 attacks.

Under the AUMF, the President is “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

In 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court confirmed that the AUMF also authorizes the detention of those held as a result of the President’s activities, although, as law professor Curtis Bradley explained last week on the Lawfare blog, “Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Hamdi made clear that the Court was deciding only the authority to detain in connection with traditional combat operations in the Afghanistan theater.” Bradley also noted, “As for the proper length of detention, O’Connor largely avoided the question, although she did refer to the traditional ability under the international laws of war to detain individuals until the ‘cessation of active hostilities.’”

With bin Laden’s death, the route should now be open for the President to assert that he has used “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” and to get out of the unwinnable morass that is the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan.

Moreover, with a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the justification for holding men at Guantánamo would also vanish, and the government would have the opportunity to return to the detention policies that served everyone perfectly well before the 9/11 attacks: prosecuting those involved with alleged terrorist activities in federal court, and holding soldiers as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and freeing them at the end of hostilities.

That, however, is too sensible a suggestion for those who, rather than accepting bin Laden’s death as the logical end of a decade of “war” that has been both ruinously expensive and morally and legally disastrous, and that has also led to a chronic loss of life, want exactly the opposite: a springboard for an even bigger “War on Terror,” and a cynical excuse to keep Guantánamo open forever.

On the first point, with reference to the AUMF, a version of the 2012 defense bill, which is currently before the House Armed Services Committee, and which is known as the “Chairman’s mark,” because of the role played in its development by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon, proposes updating the AUMF rather than scrapping it, to “reflect,” as Spencer Ackerman explained in an article for Wired, “that the al-Qaeda of the present day is way different than the organization that attacked the US on 9/11.” Ackerman added, “While the original Authorization tethered the war to those directly or indirectly responsible for 9/11, the new language authorizes ‘an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces,’ as ‘those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens.’”

Rep. McKeon has been arguing since last fall that Congress needs to approve, or disapprove of America’s current state of war,  but such a revision to the AUMF — potentially expanding the “War on Terror,” with the explicit approval of Congress, into Pakistan, Yemen, or anywhere the President perceives a threat and wishes to act — is “a big expansion of executive authority,” in Spencer Ackerman’s words, and, according to Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University, is close to “terrorism creep,” It is also, In Greenberg’s opinion, hasty. Before thinking about expanding the “War on Terror,” she explains, the US “need[s] to absorb first what the death of bin Laden means. We need to stop and think and re-think. The idea that we’re going to keep reacting and not have a thoughtful time out is just unacceptable.”

From my point of view, the proposal for the AUMF, as well as opening up new “battlefields” without necessary scrutiny, also breathes new life into a problem that has plagued the “War on Terror” from the beginning, and that should now be coming to an end, rather than being indefinitely sustained: the confusion of the Taliban, fighting a military conflict in Afghanistan (and in the Pashtun parts of Pakistan) with al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization.

This failure to distinguish between the Taliban and al-Qaeda has bedevilled those held at Guantánamo, who were labeled as “enemy combatants” and easily dressed up as terrorists, as the recent release by WikiLeaks of classified military documents relating to the prisoners has shown, when, in fact, the prison has never held more than a few dozen prisoners genuinely accused of involvement with terrorism. As a result, the prison has largely been responsible for demonizing soldiers instead of terror suspects, and this remains as true today, with 172 men still held, as it was when Guantánamo opened.

Despite the new proposal for the AUMF, it is by no means certain that the Obama administration wants a new Authorization. In the wake of bin Laden’s death, John Brennan, the President’s advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism, suggested that bin Laden’s death and the pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East were the beginning of the end for al-Qaeda, and Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, is also resistant. In March, he told the House Armed Services Committee that the 2001 AUMF was “sufficient to address the existing threats I’ve seen.”

The administration’s main problem with the proposal for a new version of the AUMF may relate more to Guantánamo, whose closure remains an objective of the administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder explained in the wake of bin Laden’s death, than to military operations in general. The proposal for a new AUMF “would keep Guantánamo Bay open practically forever,” in Spencer Ackerman’s words, because it reintroduces military assessments regarding the threat level posed by the prisoners, prevents the resettlement of prisoners in the US (even if a review panel assesses that they are not a threat), makes it almost impossible to transfer prisoners to other countries, and prevents the administration from buying or adapting a facility to hold Guantánamo prisoners in the US — mostly replays of the abominable additions to this year’s defense spending bill, but with the “military assessments” as a bonus.

Moreover, Rep. McKeon and his supporters are not the only lawmakers intent on keeping Guantánamo open, even though the object of most of the interrogations over the last nine years — Osama bin Laden — is now dead. On May 11, six Senators — the Republicans Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, Scott Brown, Saxby Chambliss and Marco Rubio, plus Joe Lieberman — introduced the “Detaining Terrorists to Secure America Act,” based on a right-wing response to bin Laden’s death, which, in defiance of expert testimony by numerous interrogators over the last two weeks, relies on a false belief that detention in CIA “black sites,” the use of torture and the existence of Guantánamo all contributed to locating bin Laden.

This mistaken approach to intelligence gathering ignores the truth — that interrogators using lawful, non-coercive methods did not need torture, “black sites” or Guantánamo to secure the necessary information. In fact, Guantánamo, a prison in which randomly seized prisoners were subjected to years of coercion until they told lies about each other, is the opposite of the targeted, specific intelligence from a handful of significant prisoners that was needed to begin the long process of finding bin Laden.

Even so, in comments after the proposed legislation was announced, Sen. Chambliss, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, focused specifically on Guantánamo, with the purpose of keeping it open forever and using it for the detention and interrogation of new prisoners, claiming, “The events of last week underscore the importance of information we obtain for detainees, particularly those at Guantánamo Bay.” He added, “For months, we have been asking administration officials where we could hold detainees we may capture. This legislation provides an answer and gives us the chance to gather actionable intelligence to keep our country safe.”

Sen. Chambliss also drew on discredited claims, emanating from the Pentagon, in which it has been claimed, without evidence, that 1 in 4 of the 600 prisoners released from Guantánamo — an impossible total of 150 prisoners — have “returned to the battlefield,” or engaged in terrorist activities against the US. “[A]s recidivism rates are more than 25 percent,” Sen. Chambliss said, “we cannot afford to let more dangerous detainees return to the fight.”

Like the amendments to the 2012 defense bill in the House of Representatives, the “Detaining Terrorists to Secure America Act” would also prohibit the transfer of any prisoner to any facility on the US mainland, preventing the President from closing it, while, as the Senators hope, adding to its population.

With all this opposition, it is difficult to see how the “peace dividend” that should result from bin Laden’s death can be realized, but that, of course, is no reason for opponents of war, of arbitrary detention and torture, of pointless and ruinously expensive foreign policies and counter-terrorism policies to give up. On the contrary, it is time for us to speak up louder than ever.

Originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

These are meant to be show trials, part of an overarching plan of “exploitation” of prisoners, which includes, besides a misguided attempt by some to gain intelligence data, the inducement of false confessions and the recruitment of informants via torture. The aim behind all this is political: to mobilize the U.S. population for imperialist war adventures abroad, and political repression and economic austerity at home.

Holder claims he wanted civilian trials that would “prove the defendants’ guilt while adhering to the bedrock traditions and values of our laws.” The Attorney General blamed Congress for passing restrictions on bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the United States for making civilian trials inside the United States impossible. Marcy Wheeler has noted that the Congressional restrictions related to the Department of Defense, not the Department of Justice, and there is plenty of reason to believe the Obama administration could have pressed politicians on this issue, but chose not to. (Others see it differently.)

Human rights organizations have responded with dismay, if not outrage. Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have been active in the legal defense of a number of Guantanamo prisoners, stated, “The announcement underscores the fact that decisions about whether to try detainees in federal court or by military commission are purely political. The decision is clearly driven not by the nature of the alleged offense, or where and when it was committed, but by the unpopularity of the detainee and the political culture in Washington.” CCR also compared the precedent-setting behavior to “Egypt’s apparent plans to use military trials for protesters at Tahir Square.”

Human Rights First spokesperson Daphne Eviatar said, “Decisions on where to prosecute suspected terrorists should be made based on careful legal analysis, not on politics. This purely political decision risks making a second-class justice system a permanent feature U.S. national security policy – a mistake that flies in the face of core American values and would undermine U.S. standing around the world.”

Most organizations stressed the fact that this was an about-face for the Obama administration. Indeed, one of the oldest human rights organizations in the United States, Human Rights Watch, called the decision a “blow to justice.” HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said, “The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair. By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.”

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers statement concentrated on the faults of the military commissions themselves, headlining their press release, “At Guantanamo, “Detainees Are Presumed Guilty”:

“Despite some cosmetic changes since the Bush-era commissions, the commission rules still permit the government to introduce secret evidence, hearsay and statements obtained through coercion,” said the association’s Executive Director, Norman Reimer. “NACDL maintains that the rules and procedures for these commission trials raise serious questions about the government’s commitment to constitutional principles upon which our country was founded. “

Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, echoed this today when he called the military commissions “rife with constitutional and procedural problems,” noting the outstanding cases “are sure to be subject to continuous legal challenges and delays, and their outcomes will not be seen as legitimate.”

The Origins of the Military Commissions

CCR, HRF, HRW, and NACDL are all correct, so far as they go. It is evident to many observers that only peculiar military exigency, backed by facts, could allow for military tribunals, as the Supreme Court’s 2006 Hamden decision made clear. It is a matter of historical record that the Bush-era military commissions policy, adopted by President Barack Obama, was initially pushed by former CIA employees William Barr and David Addington, with the encouragement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with other “War Council” participants John Yoo, Defense Department counsel under Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, and Bush lawyers Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Flanigan.

At the same time the military commissions proposal was initiated, via a military order by Bush, the Bush administration was stripping detainees of Geneva Conventions protections, as well as implementing a program of torture, with Haynes soliciting the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) as early as December 2001 for techniques used in the “exploitation” of prisoners.

In a recent article by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, it was shown that the JPRA program that was “reverse-engineered” was Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course SV-91, “Special Survival for Special Mission Units,” whose mission was to train U.S. military and intelligence personnel to withstand torture meant to “exploit” them for enemy purposes. Those purposes went far beyond the gathering of intelligence. As then-SERE psychologist Bruce Jessen, who was later to work as a contract psychologist and interrogator for the CIA beginning in 2002, noted in notes for SV-91 written in 1989:

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION,” Jessen wrote. “Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind.”

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

A former colleague of Dr. Jessen, and along with him a founder of the SV-91 SERE class, former Captain Michael Kearns told Leopold and Kaye:

“What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

The Stalinist governments of the USSR and East Europe used to make a great practice of show trials, one of the most famous being the trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty. Arthur Koestler’s famous book Darkness at Noon is about the show trial and confession of an “old Bolshevik” under Stalin’s regime. Such show trials still occur in many parts of the world, from China and Vietnam, to Indonesia, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the list could go on and on.

That list now includes the United States, where most recently, former child prisoner Omar Khadr was tried in a military commission, pleading guilty with a coerced confession, after years of torture and imprisonment in solitary confinement, his penalty phase of the military tribunal amounting to a show trial, complete with psychiatric “expert” testimony about Khadr’s supposed propensity for “terrorism.” The result? A 40-year sentence for the young man who never spent a free day as an adult, part of a staged deal with the U.S. military prosecutors, who presumably will release Khadr to Canadian authorities in a year or so, where he will continue to be imprisoned, pending any appeals there. But the penalty “trial” got a lot of press, and the U.S. was able to garner a propaganda “victory.”

Without Accountability, Whither America?

The United States is only a small step away from some kind of dictatorship. This may sound like hyperbole to some, but the lack of a clear and strong opposition to military and intelligence community institutional pressures has driven the Obama administration to the right even of the Bush administration on matters of secrecy and executive power. Proposals for “terrorist” or “national security” courts continue to be seriously considered, while the public uproar over the use of torture on prisoners has died down ever since Barack Obama told his Democratic Party followers not to “look back,” and made clear that accountability for war crimes would not happen on his watch. Meanwhile, tremendous inroads are made on privacy rights, while surveillance of private citizens, strip searches at airports, seizures of personal computers, and gathering of personal data from emails and phone calls are now everyday occurrences.

As a result, Obama has been the active creature of militarist forces within the government, and on point after point, has given way to lobbying by the military and intelligence establishments, themselves beholden to a power elite that holds the economic reins of the country, from oil to finance, in their hands. Obama’s role is most evident in his recent military actions against Libya.

The courts, too, have stepped back from their gesture towards judicial independence under Bush, with the Supreme Court ruling today that it would not hear three Guantánamo detainee cases, appeals on rejected habeas reviews regarding Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, Ghaleb Nassar Al-Bihani and Adham Mohammed Ali Awad. While the cases concerned issues surrounding use of hearsay, other evidentiary standards, the role of international law, and the right to a meaningful challenge to detention, the Court gave no explanation for denial of cert. Courthouse News noted, by the way, that new Justice Elena Kagan “does not appear to have recused herself from consideration of two of the cases because of her prior work as U.S. Solicitor General.”

Meanwhile, some anti-torture activists are trying to pursue accountability the best they can, going after the licensure status of mental health professionals who participated in the Bush torture regime. Complaints against former Guantanamo Chief Psychologist Larry James and CIA contract interrogator James Mitchell have not gotten very far, with their cases dismissed.

Another case against former Major John Leso, a psychologist working for the DoD Behavioral Science Consultation Team at Guantanamo, who in 2002 helped write an interrogation protocol that relied in part on SERE “reverse-engineered” torture techniques, was also dismissed, but according to Raw Story, this Tuesday the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) will ask the New York Supreme Court to reconsider the decision of the New York State Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) not to investigate the misconduct complaint against Leso.

The issue of the military commissions must be considered in the context of its embedded existence as part of a full-scale exploitation plan upon prisoners, implemented as part of a war policy with strong imperialist ambitions, initiated by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. The agitation for such a war preceded 9/11. The terrorist attack set lose this militarist policy, whose appurtenances — military tribunals, exploitation of prisoners, psychological warfare, secret prisons, false confessions, experimental torture programs, and unchecked executive power — threaten to end the semblance of democracy in the United States once and for all.

Originally published on Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Photo/Wikimedia

As the words of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s words blasted out into Tahrir Square, the jubilant mood of the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators there turned, first, to disbelief, then to anger.

In a rambling, often incoherent speech, the 82-year-old autocrat told the stunned crowd he would cede “some power” to his newly-minted Vice President, Omar Souleiman, but had no intention of resigning as president.

From the start of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations, the President’s total removal from office has been the bottom line. They were not likely to accept less.

For the pro-democracy forces, the crash at the end of the emotional roller-coaster they’d been rising all day was made worse by strong rumors that the Mubarak speech was to be his resignation, a possibility made to seem stronger when it was spoken to a Congressional hearing by Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, who termed his sources as usually reliable. Hopes were dashed before the actual speech by the Minister of Information, who denied that Mubarak was ready to resign.

That Murarak was handing over some of his powers to Suleiman draw boos and catcalls from the demonstrators.

One of them said to a television reporter: “That’s like Mubarak taking the country out of his left hand and giving it to his right hand. These two men are one.”

Souleiman has been Mubarak’s closest confidante for the past few years in running the military police state. Both men are from the military. Among other tasks, Sulieman has been Mubarak’s point man for relations with the CIA and the U.S. Military. As Egypt’s intelligence chief, his CIA connection put him in charge of the American government’s program of renditions. Several reputable sources have said he was personally involved in the interrogation and torture of some rendition victims.

The future relationship between the two leaders was arguably made more confusing by a “clarification” issued by the Egyptian Ambassador to the US. Speaking on CNN, he said, “Mubarak remains the de jure president of the country and Suleiman is the de facto president.”

Samer Shehata, a professor at Georgetown University, agreed that “that’s not what Mubarak said.”

Neil Hicks, a senior advisor to Human Rights First, told us, “What Mubarak said was unclear, perhaps purposefully so, but it suggested that he was delegating authority to Suleiman to oversee transition and specifically the Constitutional reforms he listed.”

International Human Rights groups were as confused as the rest of Mubarak’s audience. During the 17 days of the uprising, staff members of some of these organizations had been arrested and detained while others had been physically abused.

Amnesty International urged Egypt’s authorities to ”end 30 years of repressive emergency rule and allow ordinary Egyptians to fully participate in shaping the country’s future.” The organization called for a curb on the sweeping powers of security forces, the release of prisoners of conscience, and for safeguards against torture to be introduced in a new human rights action plan addressed to the country’s authorities.

“Egyptians have suffered under a state of emergency for three decades; the decisions made in this momentous period will be critical for Egypt and the region,” said Claudio Cordone, Senior Director at Amnesty International.

“Those now in power should view the activism on the streets of Cairo and other cities not as a threat, but as an opportunity to consign the systematic abuses of the past to history. Political transition must involve the people and foster respect for human rights,” Cordone said.

Amnesty International is organizing a Global Day of Action for Egypt on
Saturday, February 12. Demonstrations are planned in 20 countries,
including the UK, Australia, Spain, France, South Korea and Norway, as well as U.S. cities including New York, Washington and several other cities

“Mubarak’s speech is far from the needed break with the abusive system of the past 30 years,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Cosmetic changes are not enough to meet the Egyptian people’s demands for democracy and human rights. The US and EU governments should use their influence and their aid to encourage real reform.”

Human Rights Watch said that the Egyptian military, long an integral part of the government, has been a key actor in creating and defending the repressive system currently in place in Egypt.

The Egyptian military will likely play an important role in the run-up to future elections. Senior decision-makers include a number of individuals drawn from the security forces, such as Vice President Omar Suleiman, himself a former military officer and until January 29, 2011, the head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service; Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the minister of defense; and Prime Minister Ahmad Shafik, former head of the air force. Mubarak himself was head of the air force before then-President Anwar Sadat named him as vice president, Roth said.

He added, “Vice President Suleiman has rebuffed calls for the most basic reforms, such as repealing the Emergency Law, and instead claimed that Egyptians are ‘not ready for democracy,’” Roth said. “It’s not enough for the Egyptian government to promise constitutional change, they must dismantle the system behind the dictatorship.”

Human Rights First’s Neil Hicks said, “President Mubarak’s statement this evening has not advanced the transition towards a more democratic Egypt and has intensified the crisis. Proposals for constitutional reform supervised by regime loyalists hold no credibility. For democratic and human rights reforms to advance, power must shift decisively from President Mubarak and his military advisors, including Vice-President Omer Suleiman, to a more inclusive transitional authority.”

He continued: “This announcement increases the possibility of open confrontation between protestors and military forces, a situation that would represent the worst case scenario on the streets on Egypt. The Obama administration must use all their powers of persuasion to encourage Egypt’s leaders, and especially Egypt’s military establishment, to respond to the demands of the Egyptian people with an unequivocal and immediate move towards the formation of an inclusive transitional authority.”

Human Rights groups are concerned that the anger of pro-democracy protesters will place them in positions where they will be subject to harassment and police brutality. At the end of the speeches tonight, many of the demonstrators headed for the State Television building. That building is ordinarily heavily guarded by police and soldiers.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: art makes me smile, The U.S. Army

As the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, enters its tenth year, a Washington think tank is challenging intelligence estimates suggesting that large numbers of released detainees have taken up arms against the United States.

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper claimed in December — that 13.5 percent of former Guantanamo detainees are “confirmed” to have “returned to the battlefield” and an additional 11.5 percent are suspected of “reengaging” in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release.

Conservatives, along with the corporate media, embraced the government narrative that as many as one in four former detainees had returned to the battlefield, up sharply from the prior year.

However, the DNI did not offer any evidence.

But three scholars with the New America Foundation are out with a new analysis backed up with data. The authors — Peter Bergen, Katherine Tiedemann, and Andrew Lebovich — conclude that only six percent of released detainees – not 13.5 per cent – are engaged with or are “suspected of having engaged with” insurgents aimed at attacking U.S. interests. Another two percent have engaged or are suspected of having engaged against non-U.S. targets, the NAF analysis said.

A total of almost 800 men have been held at Guantánamo at one time or another since it opened in January 2002, and around 600 have been released.

Members of an NAF panel Tuesday afternoon also challenged the notion that some detainees “returned” to the battlefield, noting that many were innocent to begin with.

It has long been known that something approaching 95 per cent of GITMO prisoners were not captured by American forces, but were sold to the Americans for bounty.

Panelist Andy Worthington, a British freelance journalist who tracks Guantanamo detainees, said he was concerned at how the recidivism figures were “conjured up out of nowhere” but treated as fact by many mainstream media outlets. “It’s bad journalism,” he said.

Most reports also lacked context. “You don’t have anything like a zero recidivism rate in any prison system,” he said. The average recidivism rate in U.S. prisons is slightly over 50 per cent within three years of release.

The NAF figures were cited by conservatives to support their arguments against closing Guantanamo. Democrats, afraid of the political repercussions, joined with Republicans to include provisions in the latest defense authorization bill intended to prevent Obama from closing Guantanamo.

Obama last week called those provisions “dangerous and unprecedented.”

“Every day that a place like Guantanamo is open is an insult to values that decent American people hold,” Worthington said.

The NAF analysis is far from the first to find fault with the government’s figures. Earlier, reports from Seton Hall Law School and Syracuse University’s Transactional Clearing House (TRAC) charged that the DNI reports were inaccurate, lacking supporting data, and slanted to put the most undesirable face on the issue.

In 2009, Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall University law school issued another of the school’s reports on recidivism at GITMO, and told this reporter that the U.S. Defense Department was “issuing questionable data on the number of Guantanamo detainees who have been released and then returned to the battlefield.”

He said the reason was because the government “is now in a position where they have to find some bad guys—even if they have to invent them by naming people who were never there.”

Their ultimate aim, said, “is to foment fear among American voters and limit the freedom of the Obama administration to release any of the detainees still imprisoned.”

Denbeaux heads the law school’s Center for Policy and Research. He claimed the Center’s 2009 report “rebuts and debunks” the most recent claim by the Department of Defense that 61 “former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.”

Prof. Denbeaux said, “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have has issued ‘recidivism’ numbers 43 times, and each time they have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there.”

He added, “They have counted people as ‘returning to the fight’ for their having written an op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival.”

Denbeaux said that the government’s numbers are also “seriously undercut by the DOD statement that ‘they do not track’ former detainees.”

He told us that previous DOD reports have said the numbers of recidivist detainees have been “one, several, some, a couple, a few, five, seven, 10, 12, 15, 12-24, 25, 29, and 30.”

But he claims that in the two instances in which DOD provided written support—July 12, 2007 and May 20, 2008—their previous oral assertions were repudiated. For instance, the report said, in DOD’s July 12, 2007, news release, “the 30 recidivists reported by DOD in April 2007 is reduced to five.”

DOD’s report of July 2007 identified seven prisoners by name, but the Seton Hall group said that “as many as two of those seven named were never in Guantanamo, and two of the remaining five were never killed or captured anywhere. Of the three remaining, one was killed in his apartment in Russia by Russian authorities. None of them is alleged to have left their homeland or attacked Americans on a battlefield or otherwise.”

Prof. Denbeaux concluded: “Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there.”

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s pledge to close Guantanamo within a year of his inauguration – or at any other time – receded into neverland when Congress voted to block Obama from bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States for trial, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed..

The transfer ban was tucked into a critical government funding bill that Obama was obliged to sign into law. He called the GITMO provision “dangerous.”

The Congressional action also drew fierce opposition from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Holder announced in the fall of 2009 that Mohammed and four other al-Qaeda detainees would go on trial in Manhattan federal court.

New York officials, once enthusiastic about hosting the high-profile trials, soon objected to them. They said they would be expensive and dangerous. Administration officials said in March that New York was no longer a possibility and that the detainees would probably be tried by military commission.

New York’s objection was part of a Congress-wide reaction against Gitmo detainees coming to the U.S. for any reason, including trial. Lawmakers whipped up a firestorm of hysteria over terrorists being set free in U.S. towns and cities. Since then, there has been no decision on where the trials should be held.

The chance that civilian trials were in the offing grew even remote when Ahmed Ghailani, the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the United States for trial, was acquitted of 284 counts for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. He was convicted on only one count of conspiracy, and he could face life in prison.

The lack of a “big victory” forced administration officials to conclude that they had to hold detainees such as Mohammed indefinitely while proceeding with a select number of military commissions.

The attorney general said, “I also want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that on a very personal level and as the person who knows these cases better than anybody, anybody, that this legislation is unwise. It takes away from the Justice Department, from our investigative agencies; it takes away from the American people the ability to hold accountable people who have committed mass murder, people who intended to harm, kill American citizens.”

There are 173 detainees still at GITMO, including three who have been convicted or have reached plea deals with the Military Commissions. There are 89 who have been cleared for release but who have not been released for a variety of reasons. In some cases, countries have not been identified who are willing to take them. Fifty-eight of those remaining are from Yemen; all transfers to that country have been shut down since a Yemeni-trained Nigerian tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Christmas day.

An undetermined number of prisoners are slated to be tried by Military Commissions. Assuming all of this occurs, there will still be a group of prisoners who authorities deem “too hard to try, too dangerous to release.” These are the men who can look forward to indefinite detention without charge, although, for many of them, the reason they cannot be tried is that evidence against them was obtained through torture or other “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the George W. Bush Administration.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years and served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

If we continue to let our politicians and wealthy members of society live in comfort, free from the consequences of their actions, we are complicit in our own demise.

Our country is so overrun with corruption, we cannot remain passive and expect things to get any better.

The economy is propped up by smoke and mirrors and will inevitably collapse. Without immediately breaking up the banks and holding the thieves accountable, we will continue on our downward spiral with increasingly severe and devastating consequences.

These are extremely unpleasant truths that we are now forced to confront. We have to act now. If you are not calling for revolution or organizing, you are either unaware of what’s happening around you, horribly naïve or a fascist sympathizer.

In response to statements like those above, I’ve been exchanging emails with colleagues (journalists and news editors) who have become “uncomfortable” with my reporting style and been saying some variation of the following: “You’re being too radical. This is too extreme for us to publish.”

While I appreciate their opinions, I want to make something 100 percent clear. I am fully aware that these words are harsh, and may turn off some people. However, in extreme times, telling the truth will make you sound extreme. Ultimately, I don’t mind if you think I sound “too extreme,” I don’t care if I make people “uncomfortable,” or if, in your opinion, I’ve become “too radical.” Try telling that to the 52 million Americans who are now living in poverty. Tell that to the millions of American families who have lost their homes and jobs. Tell that to the 59 million people who can’t afford health insurance. Tell that to the overwhelming majority of the population who are stressed out, living paycheck to paycheck, buried in debt they will never get out of and desperately struggling to make ends meet.

Try telling that to all the people who have emailed me explaining their dire situations due to this economic crisis. Tell that to all the people I personally know who have taken major pay cuts.

I will not participate in the journalism of appeasement.

What has to happen for you to stop being a status quo supporting naïve journalist and realize that we are in the middle of a war? More accurately, it is a slaughter. An all-time record-breaking slaughter.

I refuse to “normalize the unthinkable.”

Here’s a list of stats that I am sure you are already extremely sick of hearing, what we have already passively accepted as “the new normal,” some new ALL-TIME RECORDS for you:

3 million families foreclosed upon;

30 million people in need of employment;

43 million people on food stamps;

52 million people in poverty;

59 million people without healthcare;

239 million living paycheck to paycheck;

$144 billion in Wall Street bonuses;

$13 Trillion in investible wealth within 1 percent of US population.

Ask yourself this question: How sick and depraved of a society do you have to live in to get an outcome like this?

We now have the highest and most severe inequality of wealth in the history of the United States. We have witnessed an economic shock and awe campaign, acts of financial terrorism have impoverished tens of millions of people and put our future prospects in an urgently dire situation. We know who is responsible for it, yet nothing is done to hold them accountable, and most astounding of all, the people responsible for this (a financial terrorism network) are still in power!

This is the largest criminal racket in world history. We need prosecutions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, right now!

Another important point in response to emails that I get: when I write that Obama is a puppet, some people still get upset with me. Are you kidding me? What kind of president allows this to happen without holding people accountable? What kind of president allows our tax dollars to be taken and handed out as all-time record-breaking bonuses while we have an all-time record-breaking number of people living in poverty? What kind of president puts career-long preeminent economic imperialists Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of our economy, and supports Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation as Fed Chairman? This is all absurd and inexcusable! These three people would be in prison if we lived in a nation ruled by law. Obama is a bullshit artist – Period, Full Stop.

This is a quintessential banana republic ruled by a puppet president. If that truth is too much for you to handle, stop reading this right now and go retreat into your “reality TV” world while you still can.

Let me defer to Senator Bernie Sanders. He recently said what I’ve been screaming about and gave us one of those very rare moments when truth was actually spoken on the Senate floor:

“There is a war going on in this county and I’m not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I’m talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.

The reality is that many of the nation’s billionaires are on the war path. They want more, more, more. Their greed has no end, and apparently there is very little concern for our country or for the people of this country if it gets in the way of the accumulation of more and more wealth, and more and more power….

Today… the crooks on Wall Street… the people whose actions, illegal actions, reckless actions, have resulted in millions of Americans losing their jobs, their homes, their savings… After we bailed them out, the CEOs today are now earning more money than they did before the bailout…. While the middle class of this country collapses and the rich become much richer… the United States now has, by far, the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth.

When we were in school, we used to read the text books which talked about the banana republics in Latin America… about countries in which a handful of people owned and controlled most of the wealth in those countries. Well, guess what? That is exactly what is happening in the United States today.”

What will it take to make you understand this? Don’t you get it? This is a war! This is a mass slaughter carried out by economic policy. This is the elimination of the existence of a middle class. These are financial terrorists committing crimes against humanity. Our country is being attacked! My family is under attack! My child is under attack! I am under attack!

We are under attack!

I know that TV news propaganda confuses people, but on a basic and profound level, whether people want to admit it or not, the overwhelming majority of the population knows that our nation has been taken over by a global banking cartel. We know that our future has gone up in flames. We know that both political parties have been paid off and don’t represent us. If the politicians don’t drastically change course and start representing the people, we have a duty, a Constitutional commitment and obligation to launch a revolution.

If you are not calling for revolution or organizing, you are either unaware of what’s happening around you, horribly naïve or a fascist sympathizer. If we continue to let our politicians and wealthy members of society live in comfort, free from the consequences of their actions, we are complicit in our own demise.

Our country is so overrun with corruption, we cannot remain passive and expect things to get any better. The economy is now propped up by smoke and mirrors and will inevitably collapse. Without immediately breaking up the banks and holding the thieves accountable, we will continue on our downward spiral with increasingly severe and devastating consequences. These are extremely unpleasant truths that we are now forced to confront. We have to act now.

People who still delude themselves into apathy by clinging to the belief that giving trillions of dollars to the banks had to be done, are buying into a baseless propaganda line. Use your commonsense. What kind of fool would think that the best way to solve the economic crisis would be to give trillions of dollars to the people who are most responsible for causing it. That is absurd! Instead of holding them accountable for the crimes they committed, they were given trillions in taxpayer funds which they used to further consolidate power and give themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses – and they deliberately impoverished tens of millions of people in the process. People are either confused as to what happened or they are in denial and afraid to confront the colossal crime committed. Whatever the case may be, there is no escaping the consequences. The implications are staggering. If you think it’s been bad over the past two years, get ready, you haven’t seen anything yet.

So are we going to start fighting back, or should I just move my family to another country? Most everyone who understands our economic and political situation are having this debate now and contemplating moving outside the country. Is that what we should do? Should we just leave the country and let it collapse?

Those who are aware have reached the point where our survival instinct is kicking in. Fight or flight?

I’m ready to fight, but I’m not ready to fight a losing battle. We all need to do what is best for our family.

Are you with me? Or should I start packing now?

David DeGraw, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured in numerous publications and websites. He is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com, editorial director of MediaChannel.org and author of The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States.

Note: A detailed response to the 40-year sentence handed down by Omar Khadr’s military jury on Sunday will be published soon. Although largely symbolic, as Khadr’s plea deal involves an eight-year sentence instead, it nevertheless provided a suitably grim epitaph to a week of events in which the staggering injustices of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” were revealed to have been thoroughly revived and reinvigorated under President Barack Obama.

At Guantánamo last week, following Omar Khadr’s acceptance of a plea deal in which he followed a script dictated by the Obama administration and pleaded guilty to invented war crimes including being an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who had committed murder in violation of the laws of war, the Military Commission circus moved on to a sentencing phase, in which the prosecution and the defense produced witnesses for the deliberations of a seven-member military jury.

Following the often inexplicable rules of the Military Commissions, the jury members made their own decision about an appropriate sentence for the Canadian, delivering a sentence of 40 years on Sunday. This was a largely symbolic victory for the government, and would only have had any practical significance if it had been  less than the eight years negotiated as an open secret at the heart of the plea deal, but it was still deeply shocking, and particularly so in light of some little-reported facts about Khadr’s case that emerged during his sentencing hearings last week, regarding his appetite for learning and his openness to positive, constructive thinking about the world.

As I explained in a previous article, one of the prosecution’s key witnesses last week was a dubious psychiatrist, Michael Welner, who attempted to portray Khadr as an unrepentant terrorist, and, at one point during his generally hysterical appearance in the Guantánamo courtroom, claimed that Khadr had “read only Harry Potter and the Quran,” and had memorized the latter while “marinating inside [the] radical Islamic community” in Guantánamo.

Even leaving aside, for a moment, the slanderous nature of his comments about the atmosphere within Guantánamo (which is belied by the accounts of those released from the prison — most recently here), and also leaving aside the problems with al-Qaeda terrorists reading the pagan adventures of Harry Potter (which I discussed here), Michael Welner’s appraisal of Khadr’s reading habits was exposed as a lie by Khadr’s defense team.

In what was described by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald as “a feisty and at times disorganized cross-examination,” one of Khadr’s lawyers, Air Force Maj. Matthew Schwartz, got Welner to “pull from his notes more of [Khadr’s] reading list,” revealing that he had also read Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, and “unnamed thrillers by John Grisham and steamy novels by Danielle Steel.”

If further proof was needed that the attempt to portray Khadr as an unreconstructed terrorist was thoroughly deceptive, this came with the exposure to the court, by Khadr’s defense team, of a two-year exchange of letters between Khadr and Arlette Zinck, an English professor at King’s University College in Edmonton.

In his letters, as the Edmonton Journal explained on Saturday, Khadr “expressed his gratitude” to Zinck “to know I am not alone now,” and discussed other books he had read, including Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. As the Journal also explained, having obtained copies of the letters, which are available here and here, “He often signed off saying he hoped to meet Zinck and King’s students one day and possibly attend the small Christian college.”

The fact that Nelson Mandela’s book left a deep impression on Khadr can be seen from his reference to Mandela in a statement he delivered to the court on Thursday, when he said, “During my time here, as Nelson Mandela says, in prison, the most thing you have is time to think about things. I’ve had a lot of time to think about things. I came to a conclusion that hate, first thing is, you’re not going to gain anything with hate. Second thing, it’s more destructive than it’s constructive. Third thing: I came to a conclusion that love and forgiveness are more constructive and will bring people together and will give them understanding and will solve a lot of problems.”

The Journal also noted that, in a letter in April this year, Khadr wrote a page on his thoughts about the book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, which must have affected him profoundly, as Beah was forced to fight in Sierra Leone as a boy soldier at the age of 13, and, as the Journal described it, “committed terrible violence but survived and was rehabilitated.”

Without dwelling on how neither the US nor Canadian governments had fulfilled their obligation to rehabilitate him, under the terms of the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which obliges signatories to “[r]ecogniz[e] the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and to ensure “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” Khadr wrote:

After I’ve finished reading A Long Way Gone, I was struck by the simplicity, truthfulness and the straight-from-the-heart fact of it. A Long Way Gone is the best example to what humans have reached from horrors they committed to the way they cured it and especially in the child field, a treatment that guaranteed success and cureness, a way that leaves no traces of the horrors that have scarred the soul.

In the most powerful passage, which ought to cause undying shame to those in the United States who have persisted with prosecution of Khadr, or, like the Canadian government, have washed their hands of him, he wrote:

Children’s hearts are like a sponge that will absorb what is around it, like wet cement, soft until it is sculptured in a certain way. A child’s soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way.

Describing the relationship between Khadr and Zinck, the Journal explained that Zinck “took on the role of professor, urging Khadr to do a lot of reading and writing so he can one day apply to university as a mature student. She also wrote from her faith, urging him to react to his difficult surroundings with love and strength and remember that ‘God keeps you close.’”

In a telephone interview from Guantánamo on Friday, Zinck said that she “began writing to Khadr in November 2008 because her Christian faith asks people to comfort those in need, including prisoners,” and explained that her inspiration came from the Gospel According to St. Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35, in which “Christ commands His disciples to comfort the sick, feed the hungry and thirsty and provide support for prisoners,” adding that, “Out of that grew the idea to encourage Omar to get an education.”

Describing how it became clear that Khadr is a “voracious reader,” Zinck also explained that the young man she came to know through the letters was a “polite, thoughtful, intelligent person.”

As a result of the exchange of letters, a group of students at King’s University College organized a public meeting to discuss Khadr’s case, at whch 700 people turned up, who “actively pushed” for him to receive a fair trial.

Moreover, on Friday, Khadr told his sentencing hearing at Guantánamo that he would like to attend King’s University College, and Zinck told the hearing she would “write a letter of recommendation for Khadr if he applied to attend the college.”

The following are excerpts from the letters between Zinck and Khadr.

October 23, 2008, Khadr to Zinck:

I got your letter and picture, was very surprised by them. So thank you very much for them, I’m in your debt and what you showed is more than I expected and that you are a true friend and as they say: The true friend is not in the time of ease but in the time of hardship.

January 22, 2009, Khadr to Zinck:

I have received your response so thank you very much … Your letters are like candles, very bright in my hardship and darkness. About myself, what can I say? We hold on to hope in our hearts and the love from others to us and that keeps us going until we reach our happiness.

October 18, 2009, Zinck to Khadr, as part of “a long letter with daily lesson plans and writing assignments, urging him to choose a novel, Huckleberry Finn or Harry Potter, and write an essay”:

See if you can do a little bit each day. You want to strike a balance between challenging yourself and to do a little more than is easy and putting undue pressure on yourself … [D]on’t feel discouraged about the time you are spending in Guantánamo right now. Live it fully. Be kind to those around you. Know that there are many of us here at home who are thinking about you. Right now you have time to read slowly and think deeply. Believe it or not this is a blessing if you will see it as such. I hope this modest plan will help to give your studies shape. Everything is an opportunity to learn, Omar. Some of the world’s most important stories have been written by men in prison. Your circumstances will teach you things that other people will never know. Be a good student of the lessons that life is presenting to you right at this moment. They are precious, uniquely yours and irreplaceable.

February 5, 2010, Zinck to Khadr:

Whenever you are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their prayers. Each morning at 9 o’clock, I include you in mine. I know you are likely busy and preoccupied these days but I hope you have had time to do some reading. Reading provides an education that no school can provide. Will you take a few minutes sometime before Mr. Edney [one of Khadr’s Canadian civilian lawyers] leaves to write me a one-page essay on whatever aspect of Huckleberry Finn most interests you. Attached are a few words on how to write a good essay … When you come home you can apply to university as a mature student. I wish we could correspond more regularly. I have tried to send a letter by way of Amnesty International but I suspect that did not reach you. Take care, dear Omar, and let me know which books you are going to read next.

February 17, 2010, Khadr to Zinck:

About me, I’m OK. More nonsense (novel) reading than good reading. Here is the list of books I’ve read since our last letter: Great Expectations, The Broker (John Grisham,) A Long Way Gone, Three Cups of Tea, the four books of Twilight series. [Khadr added that he was reading Grisham novels before he got back to “school stuff”]. The problem is some things here are so stressful you need some novels to get you out of this place. Educational things need more peace of mind. But I guess I have to do with what I have, some of this and some of that. On a separate paper, I will try to write something about the book you asked me but don’t get surprised. It’s my first time to write such a thing.

May 23, 2010, Khadr to Zinck:

Thank you for your letter and thanks for the compliment, I don’t think I deserve it. Before I end, I say again your letters are one of the most important things for me down here. I treasure them and reread them, they mean a lot.

July 18, 2010, Zinck to Khadr, on the eve of pre-trial hearings:

Omar, are you sure that this is the moment to fire your US lawyers? … The problem is that the moment you fire your lawyers, the forces of evil and injustice win … [T]hings are moving behind the scenes even if we can’t see them. We need to have faith that something good may yet happen. As you know, Omar, you are a pawn in a high stakes game of chess. If you quit before the trial begins, you lose … Be strong, Omar. Stand tall … Choose to be loving, patient, kind. As Mahatma Gandhi has said, we each need to be the change that we want to see in the world … You have done a wonderful job to date of seeing the best in everyone around you and finding ways to be fully human in an environment that seeks at every turn to deny your humanity. The strongest, most compelling thing you can do is react with LOVE to everything and everyone you encounter. This will take every ounce of strength you have but you will not be alone as you do this important work. God keeps you especially close when people are mean. He takes our suffering and makes something beautiful with it. If you ask for God’s help, He will provide you with strength you did not know you could muster.

The picture of Omar Khadr above is a courtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin, and is reproduced courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.