All of the Obama
administration's rhetoric about "change you can believe in,"
government transparency and democratic ideals went up in smoke
Monday morning in a San Francisco federal
courtroom.
A federal attorney representing President Barack Obama and his
attorney general, Eric Holder, rose to announce that the new
administration will be standing pat on the position taken by George
Bush and his Justice Department in a case involving some of the
most heinous crimes of the previous administration.
Like his predecessor,
Obama is invoking the state secrets privilege to quash a case
brought on behalf of individuals who were abducted by the CIA, held
in secrecy and without charges and transported to third countries
to be interrogated under torture.
The practice, known as
"extraordinary rendition," has come to symbolize for people all
over the world everything that was lawless, sadistic and
reactionary about the Bush administration. Contained within this
lawless act of the US government were all of the most nightmarish
features of a police-state dictatorship.
People were torn from
their homes and families by jackbooted men dressed in black and
wearing masks to become "disappeared" persons, their very existence
in US custody denied by Washington. Denied any protections afforded
to either criminal suspects or prisoners of war, they were detained
in many cases for years without charges while subjected to the most
barbaric forms of torture.
The case in San Francisco involves five victims of this state
crime. It was brought against not the CIA and the government, but
rather one of their corporate accomplices, Jeppesen DataPlan, a
Boeing subsidiary that organized—and profited from—the secret CIA
rendition flights in which those abducted were flown in supposedly
private aircraft, hooded, shackled and often drugged, to "black
sites," foreign prisons and torture chambers around the world.
Though not a defendant in this civil case, the Bush Justice
Department intervened, invoking the state secrets privilege and
claiming that going forward in any way with the proceedings would
present a threat to national security. A lower court concurred, and
the hearing Monday was held before the Ninth US Circuit Court of
Appeals, where attorneys for the five abducted men sought the
lawsuit's reinstatement. Obama's representative intervened, once
again, to have it thrown out on the very same grounds.
Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney
who argued the case for the plaintiffs, condemned the action. "We
are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has
chosen to continue the Bush administration's practice of dodging
judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture," he said.
"This was an opportunity for
the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and
rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the
course."
The claim that allowing
the case to go forward would endanger national security is
ludicrous on its face. The practice of extraordinary rendition has
not only been exposed by human rights organizations and the media,
but has been openly defended by US government officials. Rather,
the government's aim in suppressing any legal challenge is to
protect those responsible for war crimes and to prevent new
evidence of official criminality from
surfacing.
The hideous nature of these crimes is spelled out in the
complaint filed by the lawyers for the five men. One of them was
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who was a British resident
for seven years before being abducted in Pakistan and then flown by
the CIA to Morocco. There, according to the legal complaint: "He
was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss
of consciousness due to the beatings. His clothes were cut off with
a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on
his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then
poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was
frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death."
It continues: "He was placed in a damp, moldy room with open
sewage for a month at a time. He believed his food to be drugged,
but when he refused to eat he was forcibly hooked up to two
different IVs. These IVs alternated pumping different substances
into his body, the combination of which forced him to undergo
painful withdrawal symptoms."
After a year and a half of this torture, he was transferred to
the so-called "Dark Prison" run by the CIA at the Bagram air base
in Afghanistan, where his "captors repeatedly hit his head against
the wall until he began to bleed." He was held in a cold cell
measuring six foot square, chained to the floor and kept in pitch
darkness 23 hours a day. He was also "hung from a pole" and
subjected to loud noises piped into the cell. Fed raw rice, beans
and bread, over the course of four months of this detention he lost
between 40 and 60 pounds.
Now at Guantanamo, the US government is preparing to release
Mohamed, having produced not a shred of evidence linking him to any
terrorist activity.
Then there is the case of Ahmed Agiza, 45, an Egyptian
pharmacist who was seized by the CIA in Sweden, where he had sought
political asylum. The CIA flew him back to Egypt where, the
document states, he "was severely and repeatedly beaten and
routinely subjected to electric shock treatment. Mr. Agiza was
stripped naked and strapped to a wet mattress. Electrodes were then
applied to his ear lobes, nipples, and genitals, so that an
extremely strong electric current could be introduced causing his
body to rise and fall. A doctor was present throughout to ensure he
did not die from torture." He was subsequently sentenced to 25
years in prison by an Egyptian military tribunal for belonging to a
proscribed political organization.
Similar appalling details are provided in the court document
[PDF] regarding the treatment of the other
plaintiffs in the case.
In seeking to suppress this case, the Obama administration has
taken full ownership of these savage crimes.
The Bush administration's
use of the state secrets privilege, which it invoked dozens of
times over the course of its eight-year tenure, was a hallmark of
its increasing assumption of extraordinary and at times
near-dictatorial powers. The use of this same heavy-handed legal
tactic by the Obama administration has unmistakable and
far-reaching implications.
While Washington is attempting to use the departure of Bush and
the ascension of Obama to refurbish the abysmal image of US
government both at home and abroad, the action taken in the San
Francisco federal court is only one of a number of recent developments
making it clear that the essential contours of US imperialist
policy and both the criminal and police-state measures that it has
engendered will not be transformed by the change in personnel in
the White House.
Highly revealing in this regard was the Senate testimony last
Friday by Obama's nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta.
Asked specifically about
extraordinary rendition, Panetta claimed that the administration
had forbid by executive order "that kind of extraordinary rendition
where we send someone for the purpose of torture or for actions by
another country that violate our human values."
He added, however, that
the CIA could still abduct suspects and send them to third
countries for interrogation, provided it received assurances that
they would be treated humanely. Of course, the Bush administration
routinely claimed that it had just such assurances from countries
like Egypt and Morocco.
Under sharp questioning from Republican Senator Kit Bond of
Missouri, Panetta explicitly repudiated his earlier assertion that
detainees had been tortured. "On that particular quote, that people
were transferred for the purposes of torture, that was not the
policy of the United States," he declared. "To that extent, yes, I
would retract that statement."
What is involved here is
not merely the formal denial of past crimes that are well known to
people all over the world, but a signal that the CIA will continue
to carry out such crimes with impunity.
Then there is the report,
published in the Washington Post Saturday, that the Obama
administration is revamping the National Security Council (NSC),
endowing it with sweeping new powers that suggest the formation of
something akin to a fourth branch of
government.
Heading this agency is national security adviser James L. Jones,
a retired Marine general described by the Post as a "proponent of a
‘pro-active military' in noncombat regions," who "has advocated
military collaboration with the oil and gas industry."
Directing much of the reconfiguring of the NSC, according to the
Post, is John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official who is both
Obama's adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and
Jones's deputy. Obama had reportedly wanted to place him at the
head of the CIA, but was forced to withdraw his name for
consideration after it became known that Brennan was a vocal
advocate of the extraordinary rendition program and a defender of
the CIA's "enhanced coercive interrogation techniques," i.e.,
torture.
Less than three weeks
after the inauguration, it is becoming ever more apparent that the
new administration has been brought into office to defend the same
social and class interests as the previous one, is utilizing
similar methods and relying on the same personnel within the
national security apparatus responsible for the criminal activities
of the past eight years.
