Guantánamo Defense Attorney Implores Biden to Stop Cycle of Impunity by Holding Trump Accountable for His Crimes

"The only way to demonstrate that America believes in the rule of law, and to achieve eventual unity, is to hold people accountable," argues Alka Pradhan. "Otherwise, a 'more perfect union' will forever be out of reach."

by

Brett Wilkins, staff writer

Published on

Thursday, December 17, 2020

 by

Common Dreams

Hooded and shackled detainees at the since-shuttered Camp X-Ray, located 

at the U.S Navy base at Guatanámo Bay, Cuba. (Photo: U.S. Navy/Getty Images)

The Biden administration should avoid perpetuating the culture of impunity at the apex of U.S. leadership that undoubtedly emboldened President Donald Trump to commit human rights crimes both at home and abroad, argues one Guantánamo Bay defense attorney in an op-ed published Thursday by Business Insider. 

"Take it from someone who knows the corrosive effect of impunity. I represent tortured detainees at Guantánamo Bay, where the US government has perpetrated human rights violations shrouded from public view for nearly 19 years."
—Alka Pradhan, Guantánamo defense lawyer 

Alka Pradhan, human rights counsel at the Military Commissions Defense Organization at Guantánamo Bay, writes that failure to hold government officials accountable for their criminal policies and actions seriously harms U.S. national security and foreign relations. 

For example, writes Pradhan, "during the Bush administration, our use of torture wrecked our national security by weakening international alliances, degrading military operations, and even contributing to troop deaths (pdf)."

"When he took office in 2009, [Former President Barack] Obama almost immediately declared he was ending the United States' torture program," she notes. "Yet the Obama administration refused to hold anyone from the Bush administration accountable, insisting that 'we're going to look forward, not backward.'"

Yes, as @PradhanAlka says, Biden needs to hold Trump, Bush officials accountable for #torture & other grave violations of the law https://t.co/xOULVb9OXF

— ML Satterthwaite (@SatterthwaiteML) December 16, 2020

Not only did Obama break a campaign promise by failing to prosecute any of the Bush administration officials who planned, authorized, and implemented the global CIA and military torture regime, his administration actively shielded them from ever having to face justice for their crimes. Obama's refusal to prosecute officials he knew committed torture-related crimes is itself a war crime under the Convention Against Torture.

While none of the Bush torturers ever faced the "reckoning" Obama promised, his administration did prosecute and imprison whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning for revealing U.S. torture. As Pradhan notes:

Gina Haspel, who destroyed torture evidence at one of the CIA's black sites, is now director of the CIA. Steven Bybee, who authored Justice Department memoranda permitting the use of torture on detainees, is now a 9th Circuit judge who ruled in favor of government immunity for torture. John Yoo, who infamously championed the president's absolute power to crush the genitals of a child and now teaches at Berkeley Law, recently reappeared to apply his theory of absolute power to President Trump.

All of this, asserts Pradhan, has exacerbated a climate of impunity in which "the Trump administration has flouted the law on a nearly daily basis." She writes:

The administration has created detention camps on the border, initiated illegal family separations that may never be rectified, and allowed police officers to kill Black Americans without consequence or censure. Most recently, the president created a false narrative regarding the election that led to threats of violence against elected officials.

"While these most recent events are shocking, they are also the direct consequences of the lack of government accountability committed under the guise of 'national security' that has been running rampant for decades," writes Pradhan. 

There was no accountability for Iraq. For Katrina. For 2008. For family separation. For Covid.

If @JoeBiden wants to shore up American democracy, he needs to shore up American accountability, so people trust our institutions again.

That means prosecutions for Trumpism's crimes. pic.twitter.com/LXFv69e1Xy

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 17, 2020

While Pradhan does not mention specific examples here, President Gerald Ford's 1974 pardoning of his immediate predecessor, the Watergate criminal and former President Richard Nixon, as well as former President George H.W. Bush's pardons of several convicted Iran-Contra felons, illustrate her point.  

"When a 'nation of laws' refuses to apply those laws to people in power, the law dissolves into a matter of opinion... Nearly 20 years after 9/11, half the country still approves of torture—one of the most serious international crimes."
—Pradhan

Pradhan says the incoming Biden administration "will have a chance to account for past and present crimes and they need to take it. That means a long and detailed look backwards at how America has evaded responsibility in the name of 'national security.'" 

However, Biden has given no indication that he intends to hold Trump or any members of his administration accountable for their crimes and other misdeeds. To the contrary—and in strikingly similar language to Obama and Ford—Biden transition team insiders recently claimed that the president-elect has said that he "just wants to move on." And as Pradhan notes, "Biden is even considering the nomination of Mike Morell, a torture apologist, to the CIA."

"It seems that the country has learned no lessons," she laments. 

"Take it from someone who knows the corrosive effect of impunity," writes Pradhan. "I represent tortured detainees at Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. government has perpetrated human rights violations shrouded from public view for nearly 19 years."

Pradhan warns:

When a "nation of laws" refuses to apply those laws to people in power, the law dissolves into a matter of opinion. Our leaders try to avoid assigning accountability so assiduously that they twist themselves into knots trying to create suitable euphemisms for heinous acts. That's how we got "enhanced interrogation" instead of torture; "racially tinged" instead of "racist"; and "border security" out of illegally separating families and traumatizing their children...

Nearly 20 years after 9/11, half the country still approves of torture—one of the most serious international crimes. The illegal indefinite detention of brown-skinned men at Guantánamo Bay barely elicits a shrug from most members of Congress, despite the continued condemnation of our allies. This culture of impunity has never been so dangerous.

"The only way to demonstrate that America believes in the rule of law, and to achieve eventual unity, is to hold people accountable," concludes Pradhan, "whether by investigations, truth commissions, or prosecutions. Otherwise, a 'more perfect union' will forever be out of reach."

The Endless War to Preserve American Primacy

Unable to achieve victory abroad, the United States has been battered by an accumulation of crises at home. The two are related.

by

Andrew Bacevich

 Published on

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

by

Boston Globe

Demonstrators march during an anti-war protest October 25, 2003 in Washington, DC. 

Thousands of demonstrators called for the end of U.S. military action in Iraq 

and to bring the troops home. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

For nearly two decades now, the United States has been waging a war to preserve American primacy. That’s not the official name, of course, but that describes the war’s actual, if unacknowledged, purpose. Much depends on how the incoming Biden administration appraises thewar’s prospects. The fate of his presidency may well turn on Biden’s willingness to expedite the war’s long overdue termination.

During the heady days following the collapse of communism, American political elites had delighted in preening about the singular status of the United States as sole superpower and indispensable nation. That the United States was history’s locomotive, with the rest of humankind dutifully trailing behind in the caboose, was taken as given. During the 1990s, the way ahead appeared clear.

When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 blew a hole in claims of American primacy, President George W. Bush immediately opted for war as the means to revive them. Pursued ever since in various venues and employing varied approaches, the subsequent military effort has met with little success.

As early as 2009, when President Barack Obama inherited the war to preserve American primacy, it had become apparent that the United States lacked the wherewithal to fulfill Bush’s ambitious Freedom Agenda, which he described as “the spread of freedom as the great alternative to the terrorists’ ideology of hatred.” But calling off the war and thereby abandoning the conceit of America as sole superpower required more political courage than Obama was able to muster. So the war dragged on.

In 2016, denouncing the entire effort as misguided helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Yet far from terminating the war once in office, Trump merely rendered it inexplicable. Trump had promised to put “America First.” Instead, his erratic behavior gave the world “America the Capricious.” All but rudderless, the war proceeded of its own accord.

Just weeks from now, President-elect Joe Biden will become the fourth engineer to put his hand on the throttle with expectations of getting history back on track. From the day he takes office, Biden will confront a host of pressing challenges. Let me suggest that ending the war to preserve American primacy should figure as a priority.

Reduced to its essentials, the choice at hand is stark: Either restore some overarching sense of purpose to continuing US military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other active theaters of war throughout the Middle East and Africa; or admit failure and bring the troops home.

There is today no chance that the war to preserve American primacy will achieve any of the myriad objectives offered up since 2001 to justify its perpetuation.

To put it another way: Either persuade Americans that the war to preserve American primacy is enhancing the nation’s standing on the global stage and should continue; or cut our losses and concede that the United States is no longer the engine of history.

Initial signs suggest that Biden will finesse the issue. While promising to “end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold blood and treasure,” he will instead redefine the mission. Relying on air strikes, special operations troops, and American advisers working with local forces, he will continue the fight against Al Qaeda and ISIS, with strategy thereby taking a back seat to political expediency.

In effect, Biden will probably pursue a policy of evasion, unwilling to reckon with what two decades’ worth of military failures, frustrations, and apparent successes that turn out to be illusory actually signify. Yet while evasion may delay, it cannot avert such a reckoning. In the end, the truth will out. The only question is how much more Americans will be obliged to pay.

The truth is that far from shoring up American primacy, the war to preserve American primacyhas accelerated American decline. Unable to achieve victory abroad, despite the prodigious expenditure of resources, the United States has been battered by an accumulation of crises at home. The two are related.

As the war has dragged on, preexisting divisions within American society have deepened. Endemic racism, economic inequality, political dysfunction, the alienation that has emerged as a signature of late modernity: None of these qualify as recent phenomena. Yet as long as fantasies of the United States serving as history’s designated agent persist, so too do illusions that the muscular assertion of American global leadership will ultimately put things rights.

There is today no chance that the war to preserve American primacy will achieve any of the myriad objectives offered up since 2001 to justify its perpetuation. Acknowledging that fact is a prerequisite to repairing all that is broken in our country. The sooner the work of repair begins the better.

When it comes to initiating wars, post-Cold War American leaders have displayed remarkable audacity, throwing prudence out the window. When it comes to ending wars, however, caution kicks in. Ending them “responsibly” becomes a rationale for inaction.

Yet ours is a moment that calls for audacity in terminating wars that are both needless and futile, and for boldness in repairing the damage that the United States has endured in recent years. Whether Joe Biden possesses the requisite audacity and boldness to chart a new course remains to be seen.

 

 

 

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University,  is the author of "America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History" (2017). He is also editor of the book, "The Short American Century" (2012), and author of several others, including:  "Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country" (2014, American Empire Project); "Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War" (2011),  "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" (2013), "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism" (2009, American Empire Project), and "The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II" (2009).

Dear Mackenzie: There's One More Donation You Owe to the World

Unionize Amazon.

by

Hamilton Nolan

Published on

Thursday, December 17, 2020

by

In These Times

We’re going to have to con­fis­cate the rest of your mon­ey when the rev­o­lu­tion

 comes any­how. Might as well set your kar­ma right before then. 

(Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic via Getty Images)

Dear Macken­zie Scott, 

This week, you announced that you’ve made $4.2 bil­lion in char­i­ta­ble dona­tions in the past four months. For that you deserve an extreme­ly mod­est amount of con­grat­u­la­tions! You are, no doubt, besieged at all times by peo­ple who come to kiss your ass and beg for mon­ey. We come to you today with some­thing dif­fer­ent: moral con­dem­na­tion leav­ened with only the faintest sense of praise — com­bined with an idea that offers redemp­tion for you and for the belea­guered reg­u­lar peo­ple of Amer­i­ca at the same time.

Your net worth, accord­ing to reports, stands at some­thing like $60 bil­lion. How did you get so rich? You got so rich by being mar­ried to Ama­zon CEO Jeff Bezos for 25 years. More specif­i­cal­ly, you got so rich by divorc­ing Jeff Bezos last year, and get­ting 4% of Amazon’s stock in the process. That stake in the com­pa­ny was worth $38 bil­lion when you got it. You have there­fore made more than $20 bil­lion in the past year, thanks to the company’s boom dur­ing the pandemic. 

The very exis­tence of a $60 bil­lion for­tune in the hands of one per­son is a crime, proof of the way that human soci­ety has evolved away from jus­tice.

Here is where we will say some­thing mild­ly nice about you: You seem to be on the good end of the bil­lion­aire class. Many of your wealthy peers view char­i­ta­ble giv­ing as a chance to see their name adorn­ing fan­cy build­ings, or to attend lav­ish social events while being insu­lat­ed from crit­i­cism for their lav­ish­ness. Oth­ers, like your ex-hus­band, view char­i­ty as an unim­por­tant after­thought, donat­ing an inde­fen­si­bly pal­try por­tion of their wealth to the needy, or leav­ing the task to a foun­da­tion after they’re dead. By giv­ing away bil­lions this year alone, you have demon­strat­ed that you grasp, to some extent, the moral urgency of help­ing peo­ple soon­er rather than lat­er. You have pledged to give away the major­i­ty of your wealth in your own life­time — not much of an eth­i­cal achieve­ment by Peter Singer stan­dards, but in the con­text of Amer­i­can bil­lion­aires, not bad. 

Fur­ther­more, your choic­es of where to give seem to show that you do care about impact, and not just grandeur and flash. You sought out small orga­ni­za­tions, from his­tor­i­cal­ly Black col­leges to local food banks, that can do a lot with your mon­ey, rather than lazi­ly writ­ing checks to big nation­al groups that will show­er you with good P.R. and then blow a lot of your mon­ey on mid­dle man­age­ment. You exhib­it a very basic sense of human decen­cy, and that alone puts you ahead of most of your peers. 

Of course, that is not enough to give you a pass. The very exis­tence of a $60 bil­lion for­tune in the hands of one per­son is a crime, proof of the way that human soci­ety has evolved away from jus­tice. And your for­tune, in par­tic­u­lar, is not clean. Your mon­ey was earned on the backs of hun­dreds of thou­sands of reg­u­lar peo­ple who have done the work that makes Ama­zon run, and suf­fered as a result. They have suf­fered phys­i­cal­ly. They have suf­fered finan­cial­ly. And they have suf­fered exis­ten­tial­ly, by being treat­ed at every turn as cogs in a machine, rather than as human beings whose own hopes and dreams and auton­o­my should be allowed to flour­ish. Every Ama­zon ware­house work­er forced to pee in a bot­tle because they didn’t have suf­fi­cient breaks; every Ama­zon office work­er who slept in their car in order to keep their job; every Ama­zon deliv­ery dri­ver denied a chance at an actu­al career with a liv­ing wage and ben­e­fits because the com­pa­ny has seen to it they will nev­er be a full time employ­ee; all of these peo­ple put a dol­lar into your pock­et, Macken­zie Scott. Your for­tune came from them. Your mon­ey was earned by squeez­ing them into pover­ty. That is the plain truth. No mat­ter how nice of a per­son you may con­sid­er your­self to be, the fact is that you have a pro­found debt to all those people. 

You could, I guess, just write a check and give every Ama­zon work­er a few thou­sand bucks. That would be nice for a pass­ing moment, but noth­ing would real­ly change. You can­not fix a struc­tur­al debt with a trin­ket. In order to start cor­rect­ing the fun­da­men­tal injus­tices that have made you so rich, you must do some­thing that can give those work­ing peo­ple their own pow­er to take back con­trol of their lives. 

With one check, you can make it pos­si­ble to start union­iz­ing the com­pa­ny that made you a mega-bil­lion­aire.

Ama­zon needs a union. And I am hap­py to say: Macken­zie Scott, you can help with that. It’s hard to orga­nize a com­pa­ny like Ama­zon, both because it is a larg­er beast than any indi­vid­ual union has resources for, and because it will spend a great deal of mon­ey on lies and intim­i­da­tion to pre­vent its work­ers from exer­cis­ing their fun­da­men­tal right to orga­nize. But mon­ey can help to even the play­ing field. For a small frac­tion of the mon­ey you just gave out — say, $100 mil­lion — it would be pos­si­ble to hire orga­niz­ers nation­wide with the express pur­pose of union­iz­ing Ama­zon. The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly fight­ing against one sin­gle union dri­ve at a ware­house in Alaba­ma; we need to have them fight­ing against par­al­lel union dri­ves at hun­dreds of ware­hous­es across the coun­try all at once. The labor move­ment knows how to orga­nize work­ing peo­ple, but its resources are sim­ply no match for a $1.6 tril­lion com­pa­ny that can stamp out iso­lat­ed dri­ves like a giant crush­ing an ant. To give Amazon’s work­ers a chance at real jus­tice, the com­pa­ny must be orga­nized. And to orga­nize a com­pa­ny like this, there must be ded­i­cat­ed nation­al infra­struc­ture work­ing on this, and only this. No labor union in the Unit­ed States has enough mon­ey to build this on the scale that’s nec­es­sary. But you do, Macken­zie Scott. 

With one check, you can make it pos­si­ble to start union­iz­ing the com­pa­ny that made you a mega-bil­lion­aire. This is the sin­gle best way to start pay­ing your moral debt to those whose lives have been treat­ed as dis­pos­able in ser­vice to Amazon’s growth. And, it will real­ly piss off Jeff Bezos. I think we would both like to see that, no? 

We’re going to have to con­fis­cate the rest of your mon­ey when the rev­o­lu­tion comes any­how. Might as well set your kar­ma right before then. 

Sin­cere­ly,

The unwashed masses

Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporting fellow at In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. You can reach him at Hamilton@InTheseTimes.com.

© 2020 In These Times

Planet Earth To Loathsome 

Sanctimonious GOP: 

Unclutch Your Fucking Pearls

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist

 Thursday, December 17, 2020

Just wow. After weeks of seditiously refusing to recognize Biden's win and blithely demanding a "gratuitously cruel" trade-off between COVID relief or unemployment benefits and cynically gaming those benefits in a last-ditch effort to retain an undeserved Senate majority; after four endless years of silent complicity before Biblical-level evil; after all the lies, scams, cruelty, racism, golf, greed, kids in cages, shit-hole countries, pussy-grabbing, victim-blaming, murderous negligence and 300,000 dead Americans to show for it, fuck-your-feelings Republicans are now shocked, SHOCKED we tell you, that Joe Biden's pottymouth former campaign manager and incoming deputy chief of staff has dared to indulge in some altogether warranted incivility on the subject of their unholy malfeasance. In a now infamous interview published in Glamour, Jen O’Malley Dillon called GOP lawmakers what they are - fuckers - while citing Biden's theme of unity: "In the primary, people would mock him, like, ‘You think you can work with Republicans?’ I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that. From start to finish, he set out with this idea that unity was possible, that together we are stronger, that we (need) healing, and our politics needs that too.” All of which sounds, to those of us who've been living on Planet Earth the last four years, like a bit of cogent, hopeful truth-telling.

Classy and classic. Getty Image

But self-righteous GOPers found her indecorous, confirming the staggering hypocrisy of a party that doesn't care if toddlers are jailed in concentration camps as long as you don't cuss while you do it; that stood by as a foul Trump bragged and mocked, Melania derided "fucking Christmas," Ted Yoho called AOC a "fucking bitch," idiots trashed Jill Biden for being educated. In a flurry of pearl-clutching unmatched since Trump said Rashida Tlaib "dishonored herself" by vowing to "impeach the motherfucker," people sneered, "So much healing" and wrote "scoops" on Biden's "sincerity." Bullshit, retorted MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and others who called out all the fucking cowards who stayed silent before all the atrocities. "I'd clutch my pearls over this totally normal turn of phrase (in politics, at least), but I hurled them into the sea in 2016 to try to awake a vengeful god while listening to the Access Hollywood audio," wrote one. Many cited 3,000 people a day dying "from a disease our government purposefully allowed to spread" they then hoped to spread to our children through herd immunity: "That's profane." Women joked this is just locker room talk, teachers swore it's how they get through the day, journalists cited countless members of Congress who'd  "dropped the f-bomb" with them. Given... everything, it was agreed, "THIS DOES NOT MATTER." Steve Schmidt reserved special fury for smarmy Marco Rubio, who unwisely chimed in, blasting him as a contemptible "American Vichy" who "abandoned every principle" to be "handmaid to Trump’s indecency," never mind the daily Bible verses he posts. His final words for Lil Marco, and ours for the rest: “Go fuck yourself.”

Lindsey Graham saying “Trump is a fucking idiot” on loop is everything,pic.twitter.com/4C1OK97rkz

— YS (@NYinLA2121) May 3, 2019