Photo/Wikimedia

Sunshine Week, according to its website, is “a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.”

The University of Virginia here in Charlottesville is doing its part by hosting book tour stops for the chief author of the worst secret laws ever established. John Yoo will be speaking at the Miller Center and at an event hosted by the Federalist Society. Yoo will be speaking in support of unlimited presidential power, including the power to create secret laws.

When we think of government openness, we usually think in terms of allowing the public to verify that the government is properly executing the laws. There are no provisions for allowing the public to request access to know what the laws are, because laws are by definition public. Unless, that is, the laws are memos written by people like John Yoo at the request of a president.

Why would such memos be kept secret? Because sometimes the purpose of the memos is to legalize blatant crimes, to overturn actual laws with secret laws — something a U.S. president does not have a constitutional right to do, no matter whether it’s “wartime” or not. News of presidential “laws” legalizing obvious crimes could stir up concerns. Better to keep them in reserve as a legal defense if needed. In fact, Yoo wrote memos to legalize some crimes that had already occurred. But who was going to know which came first, the crime or the “law”, as long as it all stayed secret?

Yoo legalized aggressive war at the whim of any president, brushing aside the US Constitution, the War Powers Act, and the UN Charter, creating a new (secret) law in their place. Yoo legalized imprisoning people without any due process, tossing out habeas corpus and half the Bill of Rights. He legalized warrantless spying and torture, in blatant violation of real laws, public laws, laws passed by the legislative branch of the government and placed in the US Code of Law.

Yoo used shoddy scholarship, amateurish lawyering, and absurd reasoning to “legalize” just about whatever the president wanted legalized. Yoo explains now that he was hurried and pressured. Yet he does not retract any of his claims of presidential power. In fact, Yoo has made clear that he wants no limits whatsoever on presidential power. A president, in Yoo’s view, can nuke a city if he is so inclined, and another and another until the world is gone. That’s his right. So, of course, he can spy without warrants, torture, and anything else he likes, regardless of how many precedents the memos overlook or misconstrue.

Bush might not have attacked Iraq without Yoo’s work to secretly “legalize” that invasion. A million Iraqis could still be alive if not for what Yoo and his colleagues did. And had the public been permitted to see what they were doing, we would not have allowed it.

Friday will be Yoo’s second appearance at the Miller Center, which claims they invite him to balance out those who speak against him. Yet the Miller Center has never, to my knowledge, invited a member of the ANTI-war movement to speak.

On Friday Cindy Sheehan (Peace of the Action), Susan Harman (National Accountability Network), Ray McGovern (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), Charlotte Dennett (Robert Jackson Steering Committee), Mike Ferner and Ann Wright (Veterans for Peace), Debra Sweet (World Can’t Wait), Shahid Buttar (Bill of Rights Defense Committee), Nancy Mancias (CODE PINK: Women for Peace), Dahr Jamail (journalist), and Mark Lane (attorney), will be leading an anti-war march and a rally to protest John Yoo’s defiance of the rule of public law. We think we’ll be adding more to Sunshine Week than Yoo will. Join us: http://hoosagainstyoo.org

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

The ad questioned the loyalty and patriotism of nine lawyers in the Justice Department lawyers who had represented prisoners at Guantánamo before joining the DoJ. Cheney is joined on the board of Keep America Safe by Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame.

To be fair, Cheney’s ad has backfired badly, drawing the ire not only of those on the left, but also of heavyweight conservatives, nineteen of whom signed a statement last week denouncing it, declaring, “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” and adding that the attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether that system is federal court trials or Military Commissions.

Those who signed the statement included former Solicitor General Ken Starr, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, former White House lawyer Brad Berenson, John Bellinger, the former legal adviser to the National Security Council and the State Department, and two former detainee policy officials in the Bush administration, Matthew Waxman, and Charles “Cully” Stimson, who, ironically, was himself forced to resign from the DoD in 2007 after starting a similar witch-hunt against corporate law firms whose lawyers represented prisoners at Guantánamo.

Interestingly, another former Bush official who signed the statement is Daniel Dell’Orto, the Acting General Counsel for the DoD after the resignation of William J. Haynes in 2008. Dell’Orto was close to those who established the Bush administration’s torture regime as the deputy to Haynes, who was one of Dick Cheney’s key “War Council” lawyers, along with David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Flanigan.

Further criticism came from the Conservative author and lawyer Paul Mirengoff, who “contrast[ed] what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” as the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein explained, following a call to Mirengoff, and from Peter D. Keisler, an Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration’s Justice Department, who told the New York Times that it was “wrong” to attack the lawyers, and that “There is a longstanding and very honorable tradition of lawyers representing unpopular or controversial clients.”

Moreover, in the Wall Street Journal on March 10, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote that Keep America Safe’s argument was “both shoddy and dangerous.” Mukasey pointed out that “a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors — perhaps rightly — revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil’s Island for little more than being Jewish.”

This is all very encouraging, of course, because the only people who can legitimately complain that lawyers who worked on behalf of prisoners at Guantánamo shouldn’t work for the Justice Department and are, essentially, traitors to their country, are those who believe that time should have stopped before the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask why they were being held.

The only reason that the Supreme Court made this decision was because prisoners in Guantánamo who stated that they had been seized by mistake had no way of challenging their detention. This was because the Bush administration had created a legal black hole at Guantánamo, holding men (and boys) neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, to be put forward for federal court trials on charges related to terrorism, but as “enemy combatants,” a novel category of human being with no rights whatsoever.

Those who worked on the prisoners’ cases may have been doing so for reasons that some Conservatives find distasteful, but the blunt truth is that those who took on Guantánamo cases were — and still are — working as part of a fully functioning civilized country that respects the rule of law, and those who regard such actions as a sign of fraternizing with the enemy are, if not just opportunistic leeches, playing the fear card, the kind of deluded people that America can do without, apologists for the dictatorial powers seized by President Bush that would have been anathema to the Founding Fathers.

Sadly, however, much of the damage wrought by Liz Cheney and her colleagues will never be undone. In a country where a large percentage of the population is permanently whipped up into a frenzy regarding the Obama administration’s response to terrorism by opportunistic broadcasters and lawmakers, who have seized on national security issues as a winning card in a relentlessly negative campaign, it’s probable that many of the Conservative voices criticizing Liz Cheney will have been ignored.

Even more worrying, however, is the fact that, despite this backlash in defense of America’s foundation as a country based on the rule of law, other Republican lawmakers continue to insist that they should be dictating the Obama administration’s policies, even though their proposals smack of the kind of hysterical overreaction that got us in this mess in the first place.

President Obama made a terrible mistake last May when he accepted calls to revive the Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, and also signaled his willingness to continue holding other men indefinitely without charge or trial. A government driven more by principles and less by pragmatism would have insisted, as Obama suggested on taking office, that the only acceptable ways of dealing with the prisoners was to put them forward for federal court trials, or to release them.

This failure has given succor to those who are desperate to come up with novel ways of dealing with terrorist suspects that would have been far more difficult to launch had the administration acted more decisively. When Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November that five men — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — would face federal court trials for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, he was following a course that reflected the best of America’s legal traditions, and, as he recently told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done. History will show that the decisions we’ve made are the right ones.”

Nevertheless, by also reviving the Military Commissions, the administration allowed itself to be ambushed by critics who stirred up opposition to the decision to hold federal court trials, which has led to a ludicrous situation in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, in some unholy alliance with Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel (who “walked out” the door whenever Guantánamo was mentioned, according to a source cited by Mayer) has been pushing Obama to reconsider the decision to try the men in federal courts.

Sen. Graham is not the only one pushing at Obama’s self-inflicted vulnerability on Guantánamo and related issues. Since the failed plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was apprehended on Christmas Day, countless critics have charged headfirst into the lawless space inhabited by Liz Cheney and Keep America Safe, arguing that Abdulmutallab should not have been interrogated by the FBI, read his rights, and charged in a federal court, and, in some cases, arguing that he should specifically have been waterboarded and sent to Guantánamo.

This, sadly, is no fringe activity reserved for lunatics, and just last week, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a bill, the “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010” (PDF), in which they proposed to ban civilian trials for those designated by the federal government as “unprivileged enemy belligerents.” The bill defines an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” as “an individual who (a) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; (b) has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or (c) was a part of al-Qaeda at the time of capture,” meaning that it could easily extend to anyone who allegedly supports hostilities against the US — including, it would seem, American citizens.

Moreover, the bill proposes stripping these “unprivileged enemy belligerents” of any of the legal rights usually afforded those accused of crimes in the United States, proposing that they should be taken into military custody for the purposes of interrogation and determination of their status, with the possibility that, after interrogation and determination of status, some might be designated as “high-level detainees.” In addition, the bill proposes holding these men “for the duration of hostilities,” and, if desired, putting them forward for trials by Military Commission.

In a ludicrously overblown press release, Sen. McCain ignored all the evidence that Abdulmutallab’s interrogation had provided useful information, stating that the primary reason for introducing the legislation was “to ensure that the mistakes made during the apprehension of the Christmas Day bomber, such as reading him a Miranda warning, will never happen again and put Americans’ security at risk.”

We are, I suppose, fortunate that Sen. McCain did not win the 2008 presidential election, as this bill so shockingly echoes almost every vile innovation that the Bush administration established in its “War on Terror.” However, it is depressing that, while Liz Cheney has provoked some Republicans to remember that America already has laws for dealing robustly and fairly with terrorist suspects as part of its criminal justice system, other Republicans are still intent on undermining history and America’s self-image by insisting that terrorists are warriors, ignoring the Military Commissions’ lamentable history of dealing with terrorist suspects, ignoring the federal courts’ successful history of dealing with those very cases, and, in the case of Senators McCain and Lieberman, apparently believing that resuscitating the darkest years of modern American history will serve any useful purpose at all.

Like Liz Cheney, McCain and Lieberman seem to have forgotten that dictators or those who support them, rather than elected officials who are obliged to uphold the US Constitution, are the only people who believe in holding people in arbitrary detention, neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, but as “enemy combatants” — or in 2010’s remake, “unprivileged enemy belligerents” — who can be held indefinitely, and interrogated in conditions that, when last tried out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, led inexorably to the torture that John McCain used to deplore.

This story was 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.

Correction/Update: This story reported that the suicides of three individuals in Glasgow were Kosovo nationals. Later reports have identified the individuals who died in the leap off the 15th story of an apartment building as Serguei Serykh, 43, his wife Tatiana and Mr. Serykh’s adult stepson. A BBC story on March 13 said the family had previously been granted political asylum in Canada, but had left after an some kind of dispute with authorities there. They had recently been denied an application for asylum in the UK, and on the day they died had received a letter that they would lose their apartment, although no order for removal had yet been filed. Extrapolating from a Globe and Mail report on March 10, it appears possible that Mr. Serykh suffered from a serious mental illness.

The suicides of these desperate individuals have brought organized protests in Scotland, with marchers calling for an end to the “enforced removal of refugee families,” according to the BBC report. A later article by the UK Guardian quotes the director of the Glasgow charity Positive Action in Housing, Robina Qureshi, as saying the family’s death could not be attributed to psychological issues, but UK asylum policy. “The Serykhs were considered credible in Canada,” Qureshi said. “Shouldn’t that be good enough for us? They were going to be out on the street, destitute. What would that do to your mental state?”

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

“Yesterday Jay Bybee sat with the 9th Circuit as they modeled appellate court for 140 law students at the University of NV’s law school in Las Vegas. I sent out a plea to [Progressive Democrats of America's] Vegas list of edresses, and about 10 people responded. Of them, two showed up with signs and we handed out Impeach Bybee postcards and talked with the law students as they waited to get through security to go inside. I was appalled at their ignorance and/or lack of outrage. Two older students said he was a friend (he lives in Henderson, just outside Vegas), and a young one said his parents were friends of Bybee.

“We finally got inside, and listened quietly to the cases, as usual. We were ready to speak out at the end, but instead they announced they would hold a Q&A for the students. We moved down to the second row, and I asked the first question:

‘Mr. Bybee, given the new information that’s come out in the Office of Professional Responsibility Report, and the information in the missing emails, which we will surely find, what will your defense be to prosecution of conspiracy to commit the felonies of aggressive war and torture?’

‘I’m not answering that.’

‘Oh. Well.’

“Another activist, there for an unpleasant immigration case, asked something about the memos from the back, and Bybee gave the same cool, stolid non-answer.

“I would have sat quietly, but the students were asking idiotic questions, like ‘How should we refer to our clients when addressing judges?’

“Finally one asked about career options in a shrinking economy. The three judges gave good answers (‘my first case in front of the Supremes was pro bono – do pro bono work for experience’), and when they were done I turned and said, ‘And if you’re willing to break the law, you might wind up a 9th Circuit judge.’ Then the very patient and polite marshals decided enough was enough, and asked us to leave.

“Tyler, an iron worker, gave me a unique tour of the Strip, pointing out buildings he’d worked on (and hadn’t fallen from), some of which are sitting, unfinished hulks, when the money simply ran out.

“I think we have the possibility of getting some activists together in Vegas!”

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

Photo: isafmedia / Flickr

This report was originally published on Truthout.org.

Two reports coming out of Afghanistan illustrate the depth of hypocrisy and subterfuge characterizing the US/NATO intervention in that country. One could cite a myriad of such examples, so immoral and wrong as the US war there.

In the first report, a 2009 human rights assessment prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, obtained by The Canadian Press and reported at CBC News, revealed a skyrocketing suicide rate among Afghan women:

“Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides,” said the report, completed in November 2009….

The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women attempted suicide by setting themselves on fire, many of them in the early 20s.

It’s not as if the plight of Afghan women under the US-backed Karzai government hasn’t gotten some attention. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) recorded 184 cases of self-immolation by Afghani women in 2007, versus 106 in 2006. In Herat alone, in the first six months of 2008, 47 women, desperate from an escape from a life of domestic servitude, violence, rape, injustice, and other crimes, set themselves on fire and ended up in the emergency room of the local hospital. Ninety percent died from their serious burns.

The police and judiciary do not launch any formal investigations to determine the causes and motivations of suicide and self-burning by women, according to the AIHRC.

As a result, men who force and provoke women to self-immolation and other forms of suicide remain immune from all legal and penal repercussions.

To delve into the statistics only reveals a more doleful picture: almost 90 percent (!) of Afghan women have been victims of violence, 60 percent of all marriages are forced. The US-backed regime has made some token moves to assist women, such as creating police task forces staffed by women officers. But the female officers aren’t allowed to do any outreach. Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai infamously supported a law that allows for spousal rape. (Afghanistan is not alone in this, however, as Bahrain, too, “offers women no protection from spousal rape.”)

US/NATO-Backed Afghan Regime Practices Torture

As the US plans to transfer administrative control of its Bagram detention facility to the Afghanistan government, a separate scandal links the Afghan government to the torture and murder of a prisoner in its custody. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Afghan citizen Abdul Basir was tortured while in custody of Afghani security forces last December, and killed when he was pushed or thrown out a window. His family was told he committed suicide. But HRW has posted pictures of the tortured marks on Basir’s body.

It wasn’t easy to try and get an investigation of Basir’s death in Afghanistan – from this brave new government (“elected” by massive fraud) that has guaranteed justice and due process to the Bagram prisoners, once they get their hands on them. According to HRW’s report on Basir’s death:

An NDS official told family members that Basir’s father, Zalmai, signed a statement confirming that Basir had committed suicide and that an autopsy was not required. The family told Human Rights Watch that NDS officials told them that if they buried the body, Basir’s brothers and father would be released.

However, concerned that the marks on Basir’s body may have been signs of torture, the family took the body to the Forensic Department of the Health Ministry where an autopsy was carried out. The findings have not been made public. The family reported that security agency officials later came to the house where the body was held and gave them a message to bury the body. When the family tried to take the body to parliament, they said, agency vehicles blocked their way.

While the Afghan defense ministry assures the world press that “all international conventions on prisoners’ rights would be implemented” once it gets control of Bagram, the many reports of arbitrary arrest, torture, and other ill-treatment by Afghan security forces suggest otherwise. In fact, there is nothing very trustworthy about either the Afghan government or its US/NATO backers, who have averted their eyes from anything that would besmirch the credentials of their war purposes in Afghanistan.

This leads the leaders of the Western alliance to some pretty strange places. Take Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Talking to interviewers for the French-language television network TVA about the many reports that prisoners captured by Canadian forces and turned over to Afghani authorities were tortured, even killed, Harper said:

“We are speaking here of a problem among Afghans. It’s not a problem between Canadians and Afghans. We’re speaking of problems between the government of Afghanistan and the situation in Afghanistan. We are trying to do what’s possible to improve that situation, but it’s not in our control.”

For Harper, the system of transferring prisoners to the Afghans “works very well,” though he admits there are “problems from time to time.” As an example of some of these problems, read the over 40 redacted emails (PDF) sent from former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin to then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay alleging the torture of detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons.

While trumpeted as a blow against the idea of turning Bagram into a second Guantanamo, the likelihood is that things will not get any better for the 700 plus prisoners at the US facility there. Nor does it speak to the ongoing management by Special Operations forces of a black site prison, also on the Bagram Air Base. US Special Operations forces are granted special privileges to hold prisoners in indefinite detention. Evidence of torture at the SO black site prison, published in both The New York Times and The Washington Post last November, has not produced any follow-up in terms of Congressional hearings or further investigations. Instead, the handover of the Department of Defense’s primary Bagram detention site appears likely to even further reduce oversight and investigation into the plight of prisoners there, once under Afghan jurisdiction, as the promises of the Afghanistan government are not to be trusted.

Meanwhile, the propaganda from Washington continues unabated. “Surge turning tide against Taliban, says McChrystal,” blared ABC news on Monday. But no amount of propaganda is going to fill up the moral bog that is the US war in Afghanistan. Whether its targeted assassinations, leading to rounds and never-ending rounds of assassination and bombings, as at Khost, or the counterinsurgency attacks that target school-age children, as at Ghazi Khan, the campaign in Afghanistan has nowhere to go but down.

Even its vaunted aim of improving the lives of Afghan women is proven to be a lie. As a statement by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reported recently:

The US “War on terrorism” removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another. The US government and Mr. Karzai mostly rely on Northern Alliance criminal leaders who are as brutal and misogynist as the Taliban….

Last month, Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament, told Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast that the situation for Afghan women is every bit as bad under Karzai as it was under the Taliban. Joya is also concerned that civilian casualties are fueling popular support for the Taliban.

Thus far, no significant antiwar movement has emerged to seriously challenge the Obama administration’s prosecution of the Afghanistan war. Meanwhile, the administration has clearly expanded its military operations to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But support by the US electorate of this war policy appears shaky at best, as the population suffers under an unemployment rate approaching 20 percent, and an array of service cutbacks in many US states.

Whether protests against the economy will be linked to the bellicose policies of the Obama administration in its own version of Bush’s “war on terror” remains to be seen. But one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the premises of prosecuting a democratic, human rights war is no more tenable under Obama than it was under Bush.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

According to an ABC report last year:

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails….

Nabulsi says the video tapes were recorded by his brother, on orders from the Sheikh who liked to watch the torture sessions later in his royal palace.

The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim.

Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly.

Now, a UAE court has acquitted Sheikh Issa for the torture of Mohammed Shah Poor, which ended when the brother of UAE’s President and Abu Dhabi emir, Sheikh Khalifa, drove his SUV over and over the prostate body of Mr. Shah Poor, who subsequently spent many months in the hospital. Most people who have watched the savage attack were amazed Shah Poor survived at all.

“The court acquitted Sheikh Issa after establishing he was not responsible,” for the torture, lawyer Habib al-Mulla said on Sunday.

“The court accepted our defence that the Sheikh was under the influence of drugs [medicine] that left him unaware of his actions,” al-Mulla said.

If anyone were ever under the influence of drugs, it’s the UAE emirate court. The acquittal has been condemned by human rights groups. The co-chairman of the House Human Rights Commission, Rep. James McGovern (D-MA),  said the verdict “would be a joke if the crime wasn’t so terrible.” Meanwhile, the men who filmed the torture and smuggled it out of the country were sentenced in absentia to several years in prison. One of the men, Bassam Nabulsi, of Houston, Texas, and “a former business associate of Sheikh Issa,” is suing his former partner in a Houston court, alleging he was tortured by UAE police when he wouldn’t turn the video over to them.

As for the United States, State Department spokeperson P.J. Crowley couldn’t have been more, uh, measured, that is, cold-blooded in his response, assuring the world that the U.S. would “monitor” the situation:

We would welcome a careful review of the judge’s decision and an assessment of all available legal options to ensure that the demands of justice are fully met in this case, and we will continue to closely monitor it.

UAE: “America’s Largest Military Customer”

As an article at The Majlis points out, the United Arab Emirates is “a strategic ally in the region, America’s largest military customer.” There’s also an important nuclear energy agreement, begun under the Bush Administration, that has been in the works between the UAE and the U.S. Who would want to spoil such an important alliance just because the Royal Family likes to indulge in some barbaric behavior, like rape, mayhem, and torture, once in awhile?

Just as it did in Kosovo, Somalia, and Lebanon, the UAE have sent “peacekeepers” to Afghanistan to aid the U.S.-led coalition there.  According to a report this January in The National,  last year “the UAE became the largest foreign purchaser of US defence equipment with sales of $7.9bn, ahead of Afghanistan ($5.4bn), Saudi Arabia ($3.3bn) and Taiwan ($3.2bn).” Further, President Obama and the U.S. Congress recently approved a nuclear energy deal between GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and the UAE government worth $40 billion, despite, according to World Nuclear News, “recent reports of alleged human rights abuses” (italics added).

There was also the irony that the same day Sheikh Issa got off on the torture rap, the UAE Ministry of Defense and the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis opened its Middle East Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (MEISR) conference  in Abu Dhabi. The Director of Operations and Training from the UAE Ministry of Defense took the opportunity to prattle on about the “non-linear” nature of the battlefield and how  “the enemy can be anywhere across the national borders of any country.” Of course, that will necessitate buying a lot of state-of-the-art technology.

The conference was a star-studded affair, if you drool over the national security set. The Commander of U.S. Air Force Central Command was there.  So was Rear Admiral Jean Goursaud, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the French Defense Ministry. Even the head of Italian Military Intelligence got to tout the Italians’ unique contributions to the Intellience/Surveillance/Reconnaissance world. Meanwhile, “John Brooks, President, Northrop Grumman International chaired the first session.”

The U.S. military and industrial alliances can’t be made to bother themselves with Sheikh Issa’s self-made how-to tape on torture and mayhem, nor the fact that their erstwhile allies can get away with horrific crimes. Should justice stand in the way of the billions of dollars in profits to be made? I only ask one thing: Watch the tapes, and consider how far down you, as a citizen of the United States, really wish this country to fall.

The ABC report and video of the torture can be found here. It’s very brutal, so beware. Al Jazeera has also posted a video selection from the 45 minute torture tape.

Leaving this country in the hands of the people running it is turning out to be a very awful thing, not just for the people of the world, but for the people of this country. How many “terrorists” will crimes and injustices such as those documented in the tapes and in the stories on Issa’s acquittal create? How many Americans now will die because the U.S. government wanted to play footsie and fill its war chest with the likes of the UAE Royal Family? How many others have been and will be tortured in the UAE, or by other U.S. allied governments, like Egypt, or Afghanistan itself?

We need change we can truly believe in. When it comes to this government’s tolerance of torture by its allies, little has changed from the days of Bush and Cheney. As an aside, for those of us wondering what might have happened if we could get our hands on the videotapes of the CIA torture interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and others, apparently destroyed by CIA officials, this story makes me wonder if having those tapes would really make a difference. That’s how powerful the forces that push torture have become.

This report was originally published on Firedoglake.com

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

In reviewing the columns over the past few years, we wrote against racism and animal cruelty. But, there’s still racism and animal cruelty, so we’ll still have to speak out on these critical social issues.

We wrote about tolerance and the acceptance of all races and religions. But, a large number of Americans apparently didn’t get the message, so we’ll have to try harder this year.

We wrote about the continued destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax.

We wrote against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. But, since they still exist, we’ll have to continue speaking against those as well.

We wrote about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” But until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily “better,” we’ll continue to have to write why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

We wrote in support of the rights of workers, for better working conditions and benefits at least equal to their managers. We didn’t expect to see anything change, but we were hopeful that a small minority of business owners who do respect the worker would influence the rest. Until that happens, we’ll still have to write about labor issues.

We wrote in support of helping the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny the disenfranchised and marginalized the basics of human life. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the past few years.

For many years, we had written about the need for health reform. At the end of last year, Americans got a partial victory, but there is still much more that needs to be done.

We wrote against the media’s fixation with celebrity skanks and scandals. We doubt anything will change this year, but we’ll still comment upon the media’s neglect of what’s important—and their fascination with what isn’t.

We wrote about why newspapers and magazines died, why the rest have downsized their staffs and the quality of their news product. We doubt anything will change this year, but we still have to bring the issues to the public.

We wrote about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect the tenets of academic integrity. But there are still those who believe education is best served by a program manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home.

We wrote about the Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. Fortunately, last year, we saw a new administration that recognizes that torture is not only wrong but counter-productive to acquiring good information, and that the Constitutional fabric of the United States must be preserved, no many how many threats are made upon it. Unfortunately, at all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been diminished by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal. So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, a member of the UAE royal family, claimed he was drugged by two other men, and therefore unaware of his actions, which included torturing the man with electric prods, driving over him and raping him.

Thee men who released the tape have been given five years in jail.

In a statement released to the New York Times, Tony Buzbee, an attorney for the Nabulsis, said:

The verdict is a farce, and shows why the world should have no confidence in the [United Arab Emirates'] justice system. This was a show trial, held completely in secret, with one objective: to relieve international pressure on the ruling family so that the pending military treaty with the U.S. would go forward. The fact is, and the evidence is clear, Sheikh Issa tortured numerous people and he ordered the torture to be videotaped. The sheikh’s abhorrent behavior also was not isolated. I offered the U.A.E. authorities additional videotape indicating that at least 20 other people were tortured by the sheikh. [...] The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, continues to coddle the U.A.E. and look past serious human rights and security concerns there.

The Times added:

The United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is a part, made an agreement with the United States, during the final week of the Bush administration last January, to [import] nuclear fuel for use in an energy program. The United States formally signed the agreement with the U.A.E. in December.

As my colleague Robert Worth explained last April, the agreement means that the U.S. will “share expertise, technology and fuel in exchange for a promise by the Emirates to abide by international safeguards and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.”

Mohammed Sulaymon Barre was released from Guantanamo on December 20, 2009, and returned to his family in Somaliland. Mr. Barre had fled Somalia during the civil war in theearly 1990s. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees granted Mr. Barre refugee status in Pakistan where he lived and worked freely for many years prior to his detention.

In November 2001, soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities came to Mr. Barres house in the middle of the night and arrested him.

He is believed to have been sold to the United States for bounty at a time when the United States was offering sizable sums for the handover of purported enemies. Once in the custody of U.S. forces, Mr. Barre was sent to the U.S. military base at Bagram, where U.S. guards abused him and coercively interrogated him before transferring him to Guantánamo. He was never charged with any crime.

Earlier Monday, CCR…

…held a public briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. with activists and human rights attorneys to mark the beginning of the ninth year of detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo following a rally and march that morning. The briefing, titled “Obama’s Guantánamo,” addressed issues including the continued and worsening lack of transparency, resettlement for men who cannot return to their home countries, the threat of indefinite detention schemes in the U.S., the halt of transfers to Yemen and related responses to the recent terrorism attempt, and more.

Lakhdar Boumediene called in to the briefing from his home in France, and Omar Deghayes joined the briefing from his home in the United Kingdom. Mr. Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2008, Boumediene v. Bush brought by CCR and co-counsel , in which the Court affirmed that Guantànamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts. He was released on May 15, 2009. As a child, Omar Deghayes settled with his family in the U.K. as a refugee from Lybia. Picked up in Pakistan and sent to Bagram and Guantánamo, he was blinded in one eye at the base in 2004. Mr. Deghayes was released from Guantanamo to the U.K. on December 19, 2007.