North Korea

When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under the Law is a Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:09:59 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Last week, a US federal district judge, Henry Kennedy, ruled in
favor of a case brought by the survivors of the crew of the USS Pueblo,
a spy ship captured by the North Korean Navy in 1968, who were held
prisoner by North Korea for 11 months, and who were reportedly tortured
in captivity. The judge awarded the men $65 million in damages from the
state of North Korea.

Now I’m happy for the plaintiffs. Torture is flatly banned under
international law, and nobody should be tortured under any conditions
(whatever Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may think). But let’s
not ignore the irony of this ruling. In general, the federal courts
have been incredibly reluctant about making such rulings against the US
government for doing the same thing that North Korea did, or even worse.

Take the case of Canadian Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer
of Syrian birth who was nabbed by US intelligence officers in an
airport transit hall at New York’s Kennedy International Airport in
2002 while returning home from a vacation in Tunisia. Arar was held
without a lawyer, interrogated, and then renditioned on a CIA plane to
Syria, where he was handed over to Syrian secret police to be tortured
and interrogated and kept in a basement cell for 11 months. The
brutalized Arar was later released when it was established that he had
no connections to terrorism.

But while Canadian authorities have apologized to Arar, US courts
have so far refused to even allow him to sue the US over his captivity
and torture, accepting the US government’s claim of “national security.”

The contradictions between the handling of these two cases are
striking. In the Pueblo instance, the ship was engaged in spying
activity at a time that the US and North Korea were technically still
at war. The US claims that the crew should not have been captured
because the vessel was allegedly in international waters, though that
actually would be no defense. After all, during wartime, it is common
for navies to sink enemy ships anywhere they find them. (North Korea
insists the ship was inside its territorial waters at the time of
capture.)

Meanwhile, Arar was grabbed by American authorities while
technically outside the US, as he was simply changing planes at Kennedy
and had remained in the international plane changing zone of the
terminal, outside the passport check.

Furthermore, there is no dispute that the Pueblo crew was involved
in military activity at the time of their ship's capture. They were
gathering intelligence on a nation against which the US was at war.
That, of course, does not justify their torture, but it makes their
capture much more legitimate than what happened to Arar.

Arar, after all, was not even arrested. Nor was he involved in any
military or intelligence or even criminal activity. He was simply
kidnapped by American intelligence operatives. He was then renditioned
to a third country, which is itself a crime under international law, to
be tortured, which compounds the felony. And yet he has thus far been
denied the right even to sue the US government for damages. Even if we
were to hand the US government all the benefit of the doubt, and
concede that they might have been acting on false information
suggesting that Arar was an active terrorist, that would still not
justify what they did to him. He should have at least had some kind of
a hearing in US custody, and then, if found to be a likely terrorist,
should have been either held in US custody or deported to his home
country of Canada. He should never, under any circumstances, have been
handed over to the security agency of a third country known to torture
its captives.

And yet Arar is not allowed to sue for the criminal torment he was
put through, while the Pueblo crew is awarded $65 million. (His case is
currently being reconsidered by the full bench of the New York Federal
Court of Appeals, which heard arguments on Dec. 9.)

Nor is he alone. While US courts have agreed that the hundreds of
captives held at Guantanamo Bay and in military brigs in the US in the
so-called “war” on terror have a right to bring their cases before a
federal court, for the most part those courts have shown extreme
deference to the Justice Department and have been upholding the right
of the US government to detain people indefinitely without charge. Even
though it is admitted that many or even most of these captives have
been subjected to torture at the hands of their American captors, they
have not been able to sue for damages. As late as last fall, one
unnamed Guantanamo detainee who sued to require his captors to provide
him with a mattress and a blanket had his case tossed out by a federal
judge, Thomas Hogan, who, astonishingly, ruled that “while the Supreme
Court’s decision in Boumediene gives Petitioner the right to
challenge the fact of his confinement…it says nothing of his right to
challenge the conditions of his confinement.”

Read that again please. A federal judge says he has the full
authority to consider whether a terrorism detainee is being properly
held—which clearly infers that at least some of the hundreds of
detainees in US custody may be improperly held—but he is not allowed to
rule on the conditions of their detention? This would be like saying a
state court has the right to rule on whether a foster child has been
properly assigned to a foster family, but no right to rule on how that
child is being cared for!

A foundation principle of American justice is supposed to be “equal
justice under the law.” Yet here we have a federal judge awarding $65
million to the crew of the spy ship Pueblo, in large part because of
allegations regarding the conditions of their confinement as POWs in
North Korea, while other judges in the same court system have ruled
that a man falsely captured and sent off to be tortured by a foreign
dictatorship’s secret service has no right to even bring his case and
that another cannot has no right to sue to get a mattress to sleep on
or a blanket to keep himself warm!

The promise of equal treatment under the law is honored in the
breach in many ways in courtrooms across America every day, of course,
but in the case of terrorism and POW issues, there isn’t even an
attempt to pretend American courts are fair.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at "www.thiscantbehappening.net

Talk is Cheap, Even with Enemies, and By the Way, Rivals Aren't Enemies

dlindorff — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:41:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What the hell is Barack Obama talking about?

He says that America should be talking with leaders in Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Korea, Syria. Fine. But he calls this “talking with our enemies.”

What enemies?

Let’s get something straight. Enemies are people who are fighting against you, who are trying to destroy you. Is Cuba fighting against America? Is Iran fighting against America? Is Venezuela fighting against America? Syria? China? No. These countries may be rivals, but they are not enemies.

The closest we come to having an actual enemy in today’s world is North Korea, where we are technically still in some kind of truce following a hot war, but of course that war itself has been over for half a frigging century, and nobody has been killing anyone on the Korean Peninsula in decades.

The truth is, America doesn’t have any real enemies, except for the ones it has made for itself in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course the Al Qaeda organization. But Al Qaeda is a gang of terrorists, not a country, and in Afghanistan it is movement, the Taliban, once the government of that country, which we overthrew. And even there, where we have enemies, talk is better than war. It is obvious that at some point if we are ever to exit from Iraq and Afghanistan, there will have to be talks with the people we are fighting. Afghanistan’s leaders have said this—that there will have to be talks with the Taliban. And Bush’s own “Iraq Study Group,” headed by former Republican Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, concluded that the US will have to negotiate to settle the Iraq conflict. Both those processes should be begun immediately, not after more thousands have been killed.

By calling other countries “enemies,” Obama fell into a trap of his own making, though admittedly, he’s not the first to define all these rival nations as enemies. It’s a logical outcome of the Bush/Cheney position that “either you’re with us or you’re against us.”

Instead of buying into that nonsense, Obama should have questioned the premise. Then he wouldn’t be in the mess he’s in now, trying to fine-tune whom he would talk to and whom he wouldn’t talk to. Erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate and former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel had it right when, during an early TV “debate” before the media decided to black him out, he replied to the moderator’s stupid question to all the candidates of “Who, after Iran, are America’s biggest enemies?” He challenged the premise, asking, “Iran’s not our enemy. Who are we afraid of? We don’t have any enemies.” He got one of the biggest applauses of the evening for that.

As for the basic point—talking with people we have disagreements or rivalries with—it is obvious that not talking is idiotic, and gets you nowhere—or worse, into a war.

Let’s take Cuba. For exactly half a century since its Communist revolution, we have treated Cuba like a mortal enemy, blockading the country, forcing other countries to join us in an embargo (an act of war, by the way), plotting and attempting to assassinate the country’s leader, Fidel Castro, and financing and supporting an obsessed group of dispossessed rich Cubans who want to return the island to its mob-infested, neo-colonial days. In those 50 years, the only thing not talking has accomplished has been the impoverishment of two generations of Cubans. Meanwhile, of course, the US has talked, conceded, caved in, given in, pandered and invested in China, another Communist country that, unlike Cuba, actually has fought against the US (in Korea, by proxy in Vietnam, and against an ally, Taiwan). There is clearly no logical reason for not talking with Cuba, and if we were talking with Cuba, life there would be better, and no doubt, things would be better here, too.

Iran is another example. It is known that when the US invaded Iraq, in 2003, Iran tried desperately to initiate talks with the US. The Bush/Cheney administration didn’t want to talk. It was calling Iran an “Axis of Evil” nation. Had talks begun, there might not even be a nuclear dispute today. Indeed, there might not even have been a rivalry. Instead, we now have the Bush/Cheney administration pushing forward for plans to attack Iran.

We could go back to Iraq, too, of course. Before the US launched its attack, Saddam Hussein was telling the Bush/Cheney administration he was willing to leave the country. All he wanted was a safe haven like Idi Amin got, and a billion dollars. We were not told about this offer until years later. Yet think how much cheaper that solution, arrived at through a little talking, would have been than what we got through not talking. Instead of letting Hussein run off with a billion of his own ill-gotten wealth, we’ve spent close to a trillion dollars, killed upwards of a million innocent Iraqis, destroyed a country, driven four million people in a nation of 24 million into exile, ruined America’s global reputation, and bankrupted the US treasury, not to mention running up the price of oil four-fold.

Talk is cheap, I’d say.

Obama should be more forthright and admit that America has no enemies, and that we can talk to anyone.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The President's IGNORING Tour

thepen — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:53:41 -0500

THE NEED FOR IMPEACHMENT GROWS MORE URGENT DAY BY DAY

ACTION PAGE: http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/88

First the American people spoke in overwhelming numbers on November 7, soundly repudiating current policy, with ENDING the Iraq war/occupation at the top of their list. The Bush administration heard nothing. Then the Iraq Study Group delivered its report, which despite its timid recommendations on actual troop withdrawal again sent the message that something had to change immediately. The Bush administration did not get it. Instead we are told that Bush is on a "listening" tour, apparently desperately trying to find some half-credible person somewhere who will tell him what he wants to hear, that no fundamental change of course is necessary.

We are told that Bush is asking all the "tough questions." We are told that Cheney is taking "copious notes." One has to wonder how intelligent decisions could have been made by any other previously insular method. But at the same time we hear that Bush is "resolutely defiant," and in fact plans on sending even MORE troops to Iraq. So what we are witnessing is yet another Karl Rove photo-op, a dog and pony show of attentiveness, with absolutely no intention of taking any advice they would not have given themselves in the first place.

When our founders drafted our Constitution, the thing they feared most was that a despot would arise to arrogate dictatorial power, which is why they made repeated references to the procedure of impeachment as the ultimate check and balance. Most of all they sought to guard against the kind of abusive, absolutist power that they had fought a revolutionary war to escape. And what Bush and Cheney have given us if a textbook example of what they strove so mightily to ensure against as our heritage.

All the particular violations of law of the Bush Administration which have become public knowledge already, the illegal wiretaps, the authorization at the highest level of torture, preemptive attacks on other countries on flimsy and mendacious justification, these are just the inevitable symptoms of the root cause. The highest constitutional crime of all is to act as a king. And the confession to that crime was the exclamation, "I'm the decider." The instant charade of intense "listening" is nothing more than an attempt to lull, to stall, to buy time, and ultimately to defy the other two branches of government and the people of the United States ourselves, while every day up to ten or more of our troops die for nothing in an illegal war of hubris.

ACTION PAGE: http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/88

We no longer have any choice whether or not to press for impeachment. There is no other democratic way left for us to stop the runaway train of seized power. To NOT act as mandated by the Constitution is to toss that revered document into the same trash basket as Bush and Cheney have, smirking as they did all the way. No matter what the disastrous consequences of their actions they will never give up an iota of the power they have stolen without being directly confronted with impeachment. They would not hear any other message. THAT is the message we must send most urgently now.

North Korea Blame Game? Bring It On

Bob Fertik — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:17:10 -0400

Rightwingers led by John McCain are determined to blame Bill Clinton for North Korea's nukes. But that's a strategy that will backfire bigtime when Americans examine the facts:

McCain Covers Up For Bush’s Nuclear Failures

Senator John McCain’s claim that Bill Clinton is responsible for North Korea’s nuclear test this week is dead wrong. He should know better.

One more time, here are the facts:

North Korea’s bombs are built with plutonium. They produce their plutonium in a reactor they built during the Reagan presidency, starting around 1984. They separated enough plutonium for perhaps two bombs during the first Bush presidency.

When they tried to make more plutonium under President Bill Clinton, he said he would go to war to stop them. He had plans prepared for the attack. The North Koreans backed down.

Bill Clinton froze the program in its tracks. North Korea did not separate a gram of plutonium while Bill Clinton was in office. He also stopped their missile tests.

George Bush walked away from the deal in his first months in office. In March 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he wanted “to continue the process begun under Clinton.” Bush cut him down.

U.S. intelligence had detected signs near the end of the Clinton years that the North Koreans were trying to evade the freeze by beginning a uranium program. When confronted with the evidence in 2002, the North Koreans admitted it and offered to put that program on the table as part of a comprehensive deal. Bush used it as an excuse to walk away from negotiations. He thought he did not need to talk to the North Koreans. He thought he could overthrow the regime.

He failed. He issued threats and drew lines in the sand. The North Koreans walked right past them. They threw out the IAEA inspectors in December 2002, while Bush was preparing to invade Iraq. The month after the invasion, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2005, they reprocessed plutonium from the fuel rods Clinton had made them keep in pools under IAEA inspection. They took another load of fuel out of the reactor and processed more plutonium. They reloaded the reactor to make even more plutonium. They tested missiles, they made bombs, now they have tested a bomb.

Bush did nothing.

This is Bush’s Bomb. All the plutonium made for these bombs was made either during his presidency or his father’s. To blame his failure on Bill Clinton should not be allowed to stand. Senator McCain should be ashamed.