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Guantanamo prison

Going Off the Deep End Over Guantanamo

Dec 30th, 2009
by Tom.
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Re:  Likely casualty of air plot: Obama’s Guantanamo plans | McClatchy 

Maximum Security Prison at Thomson, Illinois

 

The foiled Christmas Day plot to blow up a jetliner over Detroit has thrown up a major roadblock to President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the prison camps at Guantanamo. 

The author speaks of a political roadblock, not a real, practical one. The right-wing nut jobs are stomping their feet again about how we cannot close the Guantanamo prison because some of the prisoners might reoffend. But the truth is that a great majority of the murderers and rapists and child molesters that serve their time and are set free reoffend again and again. The recidivism rate in the US is high and keeps getting higher. The following information is from the US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs: 

Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in the rearrest, reconviction, or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner’s release. 

Summary findings 

  • During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 persons on parole were at-risk of reincarceration.  This includes persons under parole supervision on January 1 or those entering parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007.
  • Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. A study of prisoners released in 1983 estimated 62.5%.
  • Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.
  • These offenders had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.
  • Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).
  • Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

Source: Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994 

We all know that some prisoners released will reoffend, no matter where they were incarcerated. Aside from psychological profiles that tell us who might reoffend, we have no way of telling who among them will actually do it. When there is no legal reasons to incarcerate a person, when there is no hard evidence that would warrant filling charges against that person, then they have to be released under US and Military law. 

The next obvious point here is the question, “Can’t our prisons hold Yemini prisoners as well as any other?” The new prison and the townsfolk in Thomson, Illinois seems to be perfectly capable of accepting the Yemini along with the others, so why should this lone,really ignorant, Yemini terrorist be a reason to halt plans to close Gitmo? 

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) on FOX Entertainment this Sunday said, “But today it’s a first-class facility. It would be a mistake to send these 90 people back to Yemen, because based on the past of what’s happened when we’ve released people from Guantánamo, a certain number of them have gone back into the fight against us.” 

Politicians are good at misdirection, and Joe has tried it again here. There are no plans to send all 90 of the Yemini prisoners back to Yemen. There is, however, plans to send them to Illinois. Him and all the other Obama haters out there are jumping all over this as a reason to keep Guantanamo open. What does it matter if the prison there is closed? The right-wing whack-jobs think that by keeping the prison open that they will have defeated another of Obama’s plans never mind what’s good for America. Besides, Obama didn’t send the two men who planned the bombing back to Yemen, President Bush did. 

Officials say the White House is counting on congressional approval for its Illinois prison plan and that it has full confidence in Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, saying that the process is more thorough than the Bush administration’s, which released two detainees now linked to the Detroit airliner plot. 

ABC News identified the men as Mohamed al Harbi and Said al Shihri, both Saudi nationals who were repatriated to a rehabilitation program in the oil-rich kingdom in December 2007. They have reemerged as leaders of an al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen. 

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A Second Look | Sanchez, Paul: Obama Torture Decision Wrong

Apr 17th, 2009
by Tom.
No comments yet

via Sanchez, Paul: Obama Torture Decision Wrong .

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), chair of a judiciary subcommittee that has been investigating Bush Administration misdeeds since Democrats took control of Congress, is disappointed in President Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA officials who tortured detainees, as long as the torture was deemed legal at the time by the White House.

“I still believe that we need to hold people accountable when they break the law and I personally would have liked to have seen some accountability for the actions of people in the last administration,” Sanchez said Friday on the Bill Press Show.

“I know it’s a difficult line to walk, but I don’t think that you become a better democracy or stronger democracy by ignoring these kinds of things,” she said.

SPC England and SPC Graner posing behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners

There is precedent for this. Lynndie England and several others were convicted in 2005 by an Army courts-martial of “of inflicting sexual, physical and psychological abuse on Iraqi prisoners of war.” Since the torture and other heinous acts at the prison at Guantanamo Bay was committed on a U.S. Naval base, the perpetrators should be bound by the same Universal Code of Military Justice laws (UCMJ codes) that convicted England and company.

From an About.com article entitled Civilian Contractors Now Subject to the UCMJ:

Jan 8 2007
U.S. Military Contractors operating in combat zones are now subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Congress quietly made this change as part of the FY 2007 Military Authorization Act.
The provision makes a very small, but important change to Article 2 of the UCMJ. Under previous law, the UCMJ only applied to civilians in combat areas during periods of war declared by Congress.
Paragraph a (10) of Article 2 originally read, “(10) In time of war, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field.”

A case can be made that those operatives, other than the military interrogators, are in fact “accompanying an armed force in the field.” So if England and her crew can go up in flames for this, then everyone involved with torture at any military installation can burn also.

There seems to be a sense or a feeling floating about that we somehow have to defend the underling for following orders when we actually sent underlings to prison for following orders just four years ago. You don’t have to go all the way back to WWII. There is also some speculation floating around that Obama is letting the underlings go and waiting for actionable evidence that higher-ups are prosecutable. The prosecutor in Spain didn’t think he had to wait for evidence, he seemed to think there was enough.

Three things can happen here:

  • The DOJ can  prosecute neither underlings nor higher-ups because Obama doesn’t like to look over his shoulder.
  • The DOJ can prosecute just the operatives, re: Lynndie England, and ignore the higher-ups as was the case at Abu Ghraib prison.
  • The DOJ can prosecute everyone concerned from George Bush down to Agent whoever and send a sharp message to anyone who ever considers doing this again. (my choice)

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UPDATE: April 17, 12:20 PM

From The Progress Report, The Progress Report [progress@americanprogressaction.org]

The Torture Memos

In response to a longstanding American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Obama administration yesterday released four Bush-era legal memos dating back to 2002 and 2005 that provide legal justifications for the CIA to torture al-Qaeda detainees. In a statement, President Obama asserted that the Justice Department would not seek to prosecute CIA officers who carried out the torture techniques approved by former President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

If the justification for not prosecuting CIA officers is “just following orders” then the case against Lynndie England and all the rest should be open for review. They got shafted.

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A Second Look: Obama’s Second Day To Focus On Foreign Affairs

Jan 22nd, 2009
by Tom.
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via Obama’s Second Day To Focus On Foreign Affairs.

PHILIP ELLIOTT | January 22, 2009 09:07 AM EST | AP

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is ready to trumpet Hillary Rodham Clinton’s installation as secretary of state while turning to veteran politician and dealmaker George Mitchell to guide the new administration through the Mideast thicket.

It amounts to a new-look U.S. foreign policy by four senators _ Obama and Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, who served together until after this year’s election, and Mitchell, who served much earlier as Senate majority leader. Obama was going to the State Department Thursday to join Clinton in addressing diplomats there and _ very likely _ setting forth major elements of the administration’s emerging national security strategy.

President Obama signs Nomination Orders

One key aspect of that policy would move forward Thursday, with Obama planning to sign an order to shutter the much-maligned Guantanamo prison within a year, according to a senior administration official. This would redeem a promise that Obama frequently made on the campaign trail.

If it seems that we are all breathlessly awaiting more news from the White House it’s because we are. Day 2 is here and we are examining BHO’s every move. We are all hanging on his every word. I’m glad we have some adult leadership in the White House, finally. Shutting Gitmo would be a symbol of our nations intent. We need to send that signal.

If you were looking around for someone to be a special envoy to the ME, and there was George Mitchell, believe me, you could do worse. From The Jerusalem Post, January 22, 2009, Herb Keinon quotes Mitchell:

Mitchell, Washington’s special envoy to the

Northern Ireland peace negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement in 1998, spoke to the Post during a visit here last month to take part in a conference on US-Israeli relations at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

“I understand the people in the

Middle East are discouraged,” Mitchell said. “I understand your feelings. But from my experience in

Northern Ireland, I share the feeling that there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. Conflicts are created by human beings, and can be ended by human beings. It may take a long time. But with committed, active and strong leadership, it can happen here in the

Middle East.”

This is a complete reversal of Bush’s policy of “Israel has a right to defend herself”, meaning that the U.S. will take a hands-off approach to any aggression by Israel. War by Israel is appropriate to the neo-cons because it will hurry the end of the world or something just as stupid. It never ceases to amaze me how many life and death decisions Bush made, not out of a deep concern for what was right, but out of pure ideology.

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