Showing posts with label rendition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rendition. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

NPR Covers(up) Torture...Again


When hard evidence of the criminality of US officials in torturing, disappearing, and torturing to death human beings falls into the hands of the so-called journalists at NPR, you can be certain that every effort will be made to obscure (or completely ignore) the laws that were broken, the horrors that were committed, and the guilt of US officials.

Two recent stories highlight NPR's longstanding commitment to the enabling of US torture policy. In the first, a civil lawsuit in New York State exposes details of the CIA's longstanding rendition/torture program.   The second story - which is creating headlines and investigations in the UK - involves the discovery of documents in Libya's Intelligence and Foreign Ministry offices which clearly show that the CIA was sending kidnapped suspects to Libya to be tortured.

The first story is dispensed with on ATC on September 1, and features NPR's intellectual heavyweight, Robert Siegel interviewing WaPo reporter, Peter Finn about the "details."  There is a lot of discussion about the millions spent on the CIA's rendition (kidnapping) flights and the focus of the story is Siegel's amazement that the US government even allowed this case to come to light: 
(Siegel) "Now, the mystery in all this is the absence of mystery. You quote the lawyer...as saying that he kept on waiting for the government to step into this case. Don't they usually do that, and why didn't they do it in this case?"
What is completely absent is any indication that kidnapping people and flying them around the world to be tortured and disappeared is completely illegal (and morally reprehensible). 

The second, more recent story - coming out of Libya - reveals documented evidence that the CIA flagrantly violated the US Convention Against Torture.  On Weekend Edition Sunday, September 4, NPR runs cover for the US/CIA.  There is no gray area in the law - unless one supports the the US being able to torture suspects: 
"It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States."
NPR is well aware of  Libya's systemic use of torture: 
(Melissa Block on September 1) "Under Moammar Gadhafi's rule, tens of thousands of people disappeared into prisons. According to human rights groups, the Libyan state security apparatus tortured detainees and held them without due process."
If it's common knowledge that Libya, under Gadhafi, tortured prisoners, that means there are "substantial grounds" for believing anyone handed over to Libya then would be tortured, and therefore makes the US and CIA officials guilty of violating both US and international law, right?  Not on NPR.  It's worth reprinting Sunday's interchange between Cornish and coup-cozy Beaubien:  
Cornish: "And, of course, we're seeing reports about files uncovered in the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry." 
Beaubien: "Yes, that's right. And actually Human Rights Watch got a hold of an entire batch of documents....And these documents show that clearly, you know, from what was in these documents, apparently the CIA was using Libya as a place of rendition; to move the suspects in, have them interrogated in Libya." 
Cornish: "And, of course, at this point these documents have not been authenticated. But the idea that the - that even the idea that the U.S. might be having suspects moved to this country with the traditional - with a tradition of brutal questioning is something that's raising a lot of eyebrows
Beaubien: "Yeah. And I should add that in these documents it does explicitly say - these communications between the CIA and the Gadhafi regime, it does say that Libya, you must respect the human rights of these people. So I should add that. But it certainly does raise questions about who the U.S. and the British intelligence services were using to interrogate terror suspects in (t)his global war on terror."
How's that for hedging, qualifying, minimizing, and excusing? If torture weren't such a perverted, disgusting, pornographic, and pathological practice, then Beaubien's straight-faced assertions that the CIA-linked document "does explicitly say...it does say...'you must respect the human rights of these people'" would be laughable naivete, instead of what it is: an intentional and ethically bankrupt attempt to obscure the fact that the US and CIA willingly participate in the torture of human beings. 

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Creative Assassinations - For NPR's Shapiro It's Elementary

Consider these two screen shots from NPR's website:

From a story on Thursday's Morning Edition:



and from Thursday's All Things Considered



Any grade schooler with a rudimentary understanding of the innocent until proven guilty concept could figure out what is wrong with the titles of these web articles: both refer to TERRORISTS, when what is at issue are detainees of the US government suspected of involvement in terrorism (or guerrilla warfare) who have NEVER faced any semblance of legitimate due process that would justify calling them "terrorists." In fact, someone with just a bit more knowledge of recent US detention policies would suspect that most detainees in the US "war on terror" are probably innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of a grade schooler, NPR's two pieces on US rogue detention are led by "a magna cum laude graduate of Yale," Ari Shapiro. During the Morning Edition piece Shapiro claims that "[d]uring one incident late in the Bush administration, OFFICIALS SAY, a terrorist from Somalia was brought to Afghanistan...." Setting up listeners for his ATC follow-up, Shapiro states, "...the Bush administration used Guantanamo, the United States and Bagram to hold detainees. Because all of those possibilities are problematic, the Obama administration is now thinking more creatively about this issue....and we'll explore those possibilities tonight on All Things Considered.

NPR certainly does explore certain possibilities. Ari's Morning Edition story seems positively innocuous compared to his All Things Considered feature which Melissa Block introduces with the observation that "government lawyers are exploring more creative options." In the piece Shapiro completely embraces the terrorist-until-proven-innocent meme:
  • "...virtually everyone interviewed for this story agreed: the United States would rather not be in the terrorist detention business."
  • "President Obama has said that he will continue - rendition...would continue sending terrorists to foreign countries."
  • "...says the Obama State Department is playing a major role in finding places to put terrorists..."
and makes his report an apologia for (US government approved) assassinations/extrajudicial executions:
"So if the US picks up twenty al-Qaeda members tomorrow and they cannot be held...where can they go? [Ken Anderson voiceover] 'To be perfectly blunt, I don't think they'll pick them up at all.' Ken Anderson of the Hoover Institution has written about these issues. [Anderson] 'I think we've actually allowed the courts to arrange the incentives to kill rather than capture.' Many national security experts interviewed for this story agree. It has become so difficult for the US to detain people that in many instances the US government is killing them instead."
It floored me to transcribe reread this. Shapiro and Anderson are blaming the courts (!) because some have actually upheld the law. Well, given those harsh restrictions, when the US suspects people of involvement in terrorism outside the US, what "creative" options does it have - except to kill them. Though appalling, it's not surprising that these NPR stories have such a mafia ethic; consider the sources that Shapiro assembled for his ATC work:
  1. "Columbia law professor Matthew Waxman handled detainee affairs at the Pentagon UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH."
  2. "CIA SPOKESMAN Paul Gimigliano"
  3. "Cardozo law professor Vijay Padmanabhan was an attorney adviser at the State Department IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION."
  4. "John Bellinger, who was legal adviser to State UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH."
  5. "Ken Anderson of the Hoover Institution"
  6. "University of Michigan law professor Monica Hakimi worked at the State Department IN THE LAST ADMINISTRATION."
Now that is some creative journalism.

Monday, February 09, 2009

Sobering as a Mugging

(updated below)

Listening to NPR on Sunday afternoon I was amazed that they were covering the ACLU case against Jeppesen - a subsidiary of Boeing - that has provided the torture flights for the CIA's extraordinary rendition program (not NPR's first story on Jeppesen).

I had recently listened to the ACLU's Ben Wizner on Salon Radio where he spelled out the history and implications of this case - at stake is whether US government officials will EVER be held accountable in any way in court for laws broken in the name of national security secrecy, or whether blanket immunity will stop cases from even going to court in the name of "state secrets."

About three quarters of the way through NPR's piece, I was thinking of the "Kudos" post I would write on this blog (by necessity, a rare event). I was impressed that Shapiro's report stuck to the facts of the case and its implications for revealing whether the new Obama Justice Department would offer a break from Bush policy on torture and rendition or would continue the same policy of blanket secrecy and immunity. But then...

Shapiro closed the piece by featuring attorney David Laufman, identified only as having "handled terrorism cases as a federal prosecutor." Shapiro says
"Attorney David Laufman believes tomorrow could be a rude awakening for some of Obama's more liberal supporters. [Laufman] 'There's that old joke that a conservative is a liberal who's gotten mugged and, thank God the new team hasn't gotten mugged yet.' But he says a daily threat briefing can be about as sobering as a mugging."
Oh we childish "more liberal" listeners who just don't understand the real Jack Bauer world of the threats facing our benevolent empire. If only we were privy to the super-secret briefings that the grown-ups get every day, then we too would be begging for more prison camps, more torture flights, more preventive wars, more spying on ourselves - in fact all kinds of "extraordinary" measures to protect the freedoms, liberties, rule of law and democracy that the "bad guys" want to take from us.

As far as Laufman goes, he has a rather checkered past regarding this story. A glance at his biography on the Kelly Drye Legal Counsel firm website reveals that
  • "From 1980-1984, Mr. Laufman served as an intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, specializing in political and military analysis."
  • "From 2001 to 2003, Mr. Laufman served as Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson at the Department of Justice (DOJ), where he assisted in managing the day-to-day operations of DOJ and helped to coordinate the Department's responses to the September 11 terrorist attacks."
How convenient that NPR failed to disclose the obvious conflicts of interest that Laufman has in this case. I don't know, it's as if NPR got my defenses down and then just when I was starting to trust the story...BAM! right upside the head...like a mugging.

UPDATE:
Unfortunately, the Obama Justice Department has decided that mugging the Constitution isn't such a bad thing after all, and has come out as a torture defender and enabler - in a most deliberate manner.