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	Abu Ghraib Swept Under the Carpet by New York Times / Chicago Tribune USA   August 30, 2007 (NYT)   We would have been hard pressed to think of a more sadly suitable coda to the Bush administration’s mishandling of the Abu Ghraib nightmare than Tuesday’s verdict in the court-martial of the only officer to be tried for the abuse, sexual assault and torture of prisoners that occurred there in 2003.   The verdict was a remix of the denial of reality and avoidance of accountability that the government has used all along to avoid the bitter truth behind Abu Ghraib: The abuses grew out of President Bush’s decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions and American law in handling prisoners after Sept. 11, 2001.   The man on trial, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, was not a career officer. He was one of a multitude of reservists pressed into Iraq duty, many of them for jobs beyond their experience or abilities. A military jury of nine colonels and a brigadier general decided that he was not to blame for the failure to train or supervise the Abu Ghraib jailers and acquitted him on all charges related to the abuse. He was convicted only of disobeying an order to keep silent about Abu Ghraib. Even that drew only a reprimand, from an organization that Colonel Jordan presumably has no further interest in serving.   Our purpose is not to second-guess the verdict. Rather, we fear that this and the other Abu Ghraib trials have served no larger purpose than punishing 11 low-ranking soldiers who committed despicable acts. Not one officer has been punished beyond a reprimand, and there has been even less accountability at higher levels.   President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials have long claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the disconnected acts of a small number of sociopaths. It’s clear that is not true.   Abusive interrogations, many of them amounting to torture, were first developed for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after Mr. Bush declared that international and American law did not protect members of Taliban or Al Qaeda, or any other foreigner he chose to designate as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Once the signal was sent that prisoners in the “war on terror” were not entitled to decent treatment, cynical lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel, conjured up perverse legal arguments to ensure that the jailers’ bosses would not be prosecuted for abusing them. The techniques and attitudes developed in Guantánamo Bay were exported to Afghanistan, and then to Iraq.   Pentagon officials say they have learned the bitter lessons of Abu Ghraib, but their civilian bosses clearly have not. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 did not provide adequate protection to military prisoners, and it gave the Central Intelligence Agency carte blanche to run overseas prisons to which anonymous men are sent for indefinite detention and abuse. In July, Mr. Bush issued an executive order reaffirming his policy of ignoring the Geneva Conventions when he chooses, and approving abusive interrogations at C.I.A. prisons.   The need to be honest about Abu Ghraib and correct the abuses at military and C.I.A. prisons is not only about upholding the law and American values. It is about the safety of American soldiers. Every right the United States denies to its detainees may one day be denied to Americans captured in wartime. Every abuse the United States visits on detainees increases the risk of American soldiers being abused in foreign prisons.   If humanity and law are not reasons enough to end the detainee abuse, then it should be done for the cause that Mr. Bush invokes daily: supporting the troops.   28 August, 2007   The damage at Justice. (The Chicago Tribune)   President Bush has done a lousy job of picking attorneys general. His first, John Ashcroft, was a grandstanding ideologue who demonized his critics by saying their efforts "only aid terrorists." His second, Alberto Gonzales, was a longtime Texas pal of the president who saw his role as toadying to the White House.   With Gonzales" departure, is it too much to hope that this time the president will choose someone who can regain the trust Americans are entitled to have in a department that is supposed to stand for justice?   It"s been a long time since the country has had an attorney general who could inspire real pride. But you have to go back to the Watergate scandal to find one who has done as much as Gonzales to damage public confidence.   His dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year raised suspicions that they were sacked for failing to advance the interests of the Republican Party -- mostly by refusing to pursue investigations of political corruption against Democrats. Congressional hearings provided a good deal of evidence to support the suspicions.   Among the most damning witnesses was the attorney general, who was repeatedly unable to give a plausible explanation of why these prosecutors had to go. So embarrassing was his performance that even some Bush allies in the Senate threw up their hands in disgust.   But Gonzales was less the cause of the problem than a symptom of a deeper ill: the administration"s unwillingness to recognize that the attorney general has to put the interests of the citizenry above the interests of his president or party. To politicize law enforcement is to risk forfeiting the public"s basic faith in our system of government, by suggesting that prosecutions are just a matter of who"s got power.   Former Deputy Atty. Gen. James Comey, who served under both Ashcroft and Gonzales, was asked by one committee about claims that even career prosecutors, who are supposed to be chosen without regard for political affiliations, were subject to partisan litmus tests. If that was going on, he replied, it "deprives the department of its lifeblood, which is the ability to stand up and have juries of all stripes believe what you say, and have sheriffs and judges and jailers -- the people we deal with -- trust the Department of Justice."   Comey is the sort of person who could help rebuild the department"s ethos as well as its reputation, but his unwillingness to automatically defend the administration has alienated the White House. Independence, however, is a trait desperately needed in the next attorney general.   When Gonzales was named to succeed Ashcroft in 2004, this page said it would "be his task to restore the trust and prestige of an office that his predecessor did so much to injure." Instead, Gonzales damaged it further.   The president ought to have learned from this experience. When he chooses a new attorney general, it should be someone who commands respect across party lines for ability, integrity, a level head and devotion to the good of the country. It"s his third chance.   August 27, 2007   Gonzales leaves shameful Human Rights Legacy. (Human Rights Watch)   The resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should galvanize an investigation into US detention policies during his tenure both at the Justice Department and as White House Counsel from 2002 to 2005, Human Rights Watch urged today.   “The most important responsibility of the attorney general is to say no when government officials – including the president – are tempted to cross legal boundaries,” said Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “History will remember Gonzales as the man who never said no to torture and detention policies that violated US and international law.”   As attorney general and White House counsel, Gonzales signed off on CIA interrogation techniques such as “water boarding” that the United States has long considered to be torture, and consistently refused to rule out the use of even the most extreme methods. Recently, in answers to questions submitted by US Senator Richard Durbin, the judge advocates general of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps said that many of the techniques Gonzales approved, including water boarding and painful stress positions, violated laws that criminalize torture.   Yet, when asked at a Senate hearing on June 24, 2007 whether an American citizen could lawfully be subjected to such methods, Gonzales refused, stating: “You’re asking me to answer a question which, I think, may provide insight into activities that the CIA may be involved with in the future.”   Over the last seven years, Gonzales was also in a position to approve policies such as secret detention, the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to countries that systematically practice torture, and the use of military commissions that deny basic due process. He reviewed and did not object to the Justice Department’s infamous “torture memo,” which argued that the president of the United States could not be bound in wartime by laws prohibiting torture.   Gonzales also opposed efforts by other officials in the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.   In a January 25, 2002 memorandum to President Bush, Gonzales urged the president to declare the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism “in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo drew a strong rebuke from then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, but would become administration policy.   Human Rights Watch called on the US Congress to investigate the detention policies approved under Gonzales’s watch, and to determine whether specific interrogation practices violated the law. It also urged the Congress not to confirm a successor to Gonzales unless he or she repudiates the notion that the president may ignore laws against torture and rules out the use of the abusive interrogation techniques employed by the Bush administration in the past.
	Nigeria: Tens of thousands languishing in prison awaiting trial by IRIN News   18 August 2007   About 60 percent of inmates in Nigerian prisons await trial, often for years, in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, human rights groups and UN officials say.   Of Nigeria’s 40,000 or so prisoners, 25,000 have never been convicted of a crime, and remain in prison up to 14 years without going to court.   “In some prisons, the conditions of inmates awaiting trial are worse than the inmates on death row,” said Aster van Kregten, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International and part of a delegation who visited 10 prisons in the states of Enugu, Kano and Lagos, and in the Federal Capital Territory at the end of July. “We were quite shocked.”   Amnesty International found cells of 200 inmates with only two toilets, often overflowing by the end of each day; boys as young as 11 held in cells with adult men; and rampant disease, including tuberculosis, malaria and rabies.   “In almost every cell people were sleeping on the floor,” van Kregten told IRIN. “Many inmates do have a bed, but don’t have a mattress.” She added that in many cases those awaiting trial were allowed outside for fresh air only once a week.   “The list [of problems in Nigerian prisons] is endless,” said Uju Agomoh, executive director of the Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), Nigeria’s largest prisoners’ rights organisation.   He said while there had been “marginal” improvement since the return to civil rule in 1999, mentally ill people, who have never committed a crime, are still mixed with criminal inmates, and female inmates do not even receive sanitary towels.   According to a 2006 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, three quarters of those awaiting trial in Nigeria are charged with armed robbery, most get no legal assistance from the Legal Aid Council, and a “shocking” 3.7 per cent remain in prison because of lost case files. The rapporteur, Philip Alston, called their conditions “seriously health-threatening”.   A second report in March 2007 by the UN Special Rapporteur on torture found that prisons often housed populations twice or triple their capacity, with many inmates being held without charge, with insufficient food, water, and medical care, “let alone any opportunities for educational, leisure, or vocational training”. The rapporteur, Manfred Nowak, also found 700 prisoners who spent up to 20 years on death row, usually in overcrowded cells.   * Visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
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