One of the little reported details from the latest batch of Wikileaks material are cables showing that the Obama Administration worked hard behind the scenes not only to prevent any investigation of torture in the United States but shutdown efforts abroad to enforce the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. This includes threatening the Spanish that, if they did not derail a judicial investigation, it would have serious consequences in bilateral relations. I discussed these cables on Countdown.
For two years, President Obama has worked to block the investigation of torture under the Bush Administration — even as both Dick Cheney and George Bush publicly admit to ordering waterboarding of suspects.
David Corn in Mother Jones has an interesting posting today on the issue.
A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department discloses how the Administration discarded any respect for the independence of the judiciary in Spain and pressured the government to derail the prosecution of Bush officials. Human rights groups around the world had called for such enforcement in light of Obama promise that no torturers would be prosecuted and Holder’s blocking of any investigation into war crimes.
The Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had filed a demand for prosecution with Spain’s National Court to indict former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. It had a compelled factual basis that these men ordered or facilitated war crimes — a record that has only become stronger since this confrontation.
American officials pressured government officials, including prosecutors and judges, not to enforce international law and that this was “a very serious matter for the USG.” It was Obama’s own effort at creating a “Coalition of the Unwilling” — nations unwilling to enforce treaties on torture and war crimes when the alleged culprits are American officials.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) joined the embassy’s charge d’affaires in the secret campaign to block the prosection of Judge Baltasar Garzón.
Corn notes that, during an April 14, 2009 White House briefing, he asked press secretary Robert Gibbs if the Obama administration would cooperate with any request from Spain on the investigation and prosecution. Gibbs insisted that this was nothing but “hypotheticals” and did not disclose that in fact the Obama Administration was working diligently to block the Spanish case.
Just as many conservatives abandoned their principles in following George Bush blindly, many liberals have chosen to ignore Obama’s concerted efforts to protect individuals accused of war crimes. Under our treaty obligations, the United States has the primary responsibility to prosecute torture by U.S. citizens. That responsibility rests with the Executive Branch – the prosecuting authority of the United States. What is particularly disgraceful is that Obama would refuse to fulfill this responsibility under our treaties and international law and then demand the same hypocrisy from our allies.
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No wonder it’s the criminals who caused this mess who are the one’s in charge of fixing it. I can’t breath with all these elephants in the room.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/02/wikileaks/index.html
Friday, Sep 2, 2011 07:03 ET
Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga
by Glenn Greenwald
From the article:
“That said, there’s little doubt that release of all these documents in unredacted form poses real risk to some of the individuals identified in them, and that is truly lamentable. But it is just as true that WikiLeaks easily remains an important force for good. The acts of deliberate evil committed by the world’s most powerful factions which it has exposed vastly outweigh the mistakes which this still-young and pioneering organization has made. And the harm caused by corrupt, excessive secrecy easily outweighs the harm caused by unauthorized, inadvisable leaks.”
OS,
As soon as I have a firm date from Arlington, I will pass it on. Good luck with your daughter. Hang in there.
Thanks Gene. I probably will give you a call sometime in the next few days. I wish I could get away and just visit some people for relaxation and distractions. You would be right up there at the top of my list of folks to visit.
Raff, if I can get away, I would be honored to come to the memorial service at Arlington next spring. Keep us posted and I will try to make it. It is a six hour drive from here, so that is not too bad.
OS,
I am most troubled to hear about your daughter. Should you need a friendly ear or just a mindless distraction, you know my door is always open.
anon nurse sez: “Rafflaw said it best… I can only imagine how much you must miss your son and grandson.”
******************************************
Yes, we do. Seems that part of the family will suffer even more. My grandson’s mother, our 42 year old daughter, has been ill for several years. Yesterday, her attending doctor consulted Hospice for her. I fear it is only a matter of time before she joins her beloved Reed.
Raff, we had a ceremony at the National Cemetery here for my ggg-grandfather, who was one I referenced in the comment above. He joined at the age of 13 as a fife player. At fifteen he was conscripted as a private in the militia. Five or six weeks after his sixteenth birthday, he was fighting Major Patrick Ferguson’s loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Later he was at Cowan’s Ford, Beattie’s Creek and Cowpens. Then on to Yorktown to reinforce Washington there only a few days past his seventeenth birthday. He returned home to farm after the war, living to the age of 66. His son, my gg-grandfather volunteered for the war of 1812 and fought with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. His son, my great grandfather was a sergeant in the Confederate Army. That was on my mother’s side. On my father;s side my paternal great grandfather fought at San Juan Hill with TR.
When we had the memorial service for him, he was honored with a memorial stone and full military honors. We had a piper who played several appropriate tunes, but the most appropriate was “The Minstrel Boy.” The old guy really was a minstrel boy when he went to war as a 13 year old fife player.
I have two Presidential Memorial Certificates signed by President Obama, one for my son and one for my ggg-grandfather.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdA4NlJiikM
Anon nurse,
Thanks! It will also be a grand gesture for my 88 year old Mother.
rafflaw,
“60 years late”, but what a lovely gesture for your father…
OS,
Rafflaw said it best… I can only imagine how much you must miss your son and grandson.
OS,
You should be very proud of your family. We are actually going to honor my Father with a full military honors ceremony and headstone at Arlington in the Spring. When I learned of this honor from the folks at Dover, I almost broke down on the phone. It is 60 years late, but it will help settle some of my longstanding demons.
Your son lives on in your heart and he was blessed to have you and your wife as parents.
My family has a thousand year history of service that we know of. Two of my g^n-grandfathers fought at Kings Mountain and Yorktown. One died in the Peach Orchard at Shiloh and another at Pea Ridge in Arkansas. My paternal great-grandfather rode with Teddy Roosevelt in the firefight when TR earned the Medal of Honor. My sons served and one sleeps forever in the National Cemetery. The lament, “Flowers of the Forest” was written by a family member five hundred years ago for the ten thousand Scots who died at the bloody battle at Flodden Field. It was piped for my son and one day will be piped for me.
Having said that, it is the ultimate naivete to believe that bad shit does not happen in wars. Like any other large group of people, the military has its share of both heroes and villains. There are always going to be troops on both sides who are sadistic psychopaths that create problems for their units and their country. Oftentimes, the military, like some law enforcement agencies, have a culture that almost instinctively protects their own when they have a rogue member. This is not right, but it is human nature and it happens.
Regarding the WikiLeaks cable, I have no specific reason to believe or disbelieve whether that incident really happened because I do not have all the background information. Do such incidents actually happen? Yes they do. But as for that particular one, it is reported as a genuine cable and if true, I am both angry and sad. If it is false, I hope the truth eventually comes out. While I am a skeptic, I fear the report is true. But I hope not.
No way,
You are confusing my son with someone else. My son returned safely from his recent tour in Afghanistan. My Father was killed in the service during the Korean Conflict so maybe that was what you were confused about. You are once again incorrect that I insulted the military when I corrected your inaccurate statement. I never stated that you had to prove your claim. You may want to re-read my statements. That is if you are really interested in the truth.
http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/news/feature/2011/09/01/wikileaks_revelations
Breakdown: The new WikiLeaks scoops
A new batch of unredacted diplomatic cables drops
By Peter Finocchiaro
Wikileaks placeholder
Reuters
When it comes to making news, WikiLeaks is going it alone — and in a crowd.
Last week, the whistle-blowing organization dropped 120,000 more diplomatic cables, apparently drawn from the cache of 250,000 first tapped last November. But whereas the group previously collaborated with newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian — and redacted potentially sensitive information — the new batch of documents is unredacted. Government sources worry that personal information might jeopardize the safety of diplomatic sources. Human rights activists worry that applicants for political asylum may face reprisals.
Instead of partnering with senior editors in London and Washington, WikiLeaks is now engaging in social media crowd-sourcing — asking for recommendations of interesting cables at #wlfinds on Twitter. While the editorial process is slow, the new documents are yielding news stories such as:
Iraq atrocity and coverup: Probably the most shocking cable, a message from the State Department’s Phillip Alston to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in March 2006, details the summary execution by U.S. soldiers of an Iraqi family — including five children under the ages of 5, and a 74-year-old woman. “Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that ‘autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.'”
Al-Qaida Down Under: Unredacted cables identified close to two dozen Australian citizens whom that government suspected of having ties to al-Qaida. Australia’s attorney general, Robert McClelland, condemned WikiLeaks, saying “The publication of any information that could compromise Australia’s national security, or inhibit the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor potential threats, is incredibly irresponsible.”
Diplomats as lobbyists: After Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, several federal officials and agencies, “including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Commerce, and the Federal Trade Commission,” pressured the European Union to allow the merger to go through.
American settlers in Palestinian territory: Cables from Israel lent new insight into the motivations of Americans who uproot their families to live (illegally) in the West Bank. As Salon’s Justin Elliott pointed out last week, consular officers stationed at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv found that ” U.S. citizens’ reasons for moving to Jewish settlements in the area where Palestinians hope to establish a state were three-fold: social, economic, and ideological.”
Sex traffickers in Sweden: A 2006 cable recounts the story of 120 Chinese children, between the ages of 10 and 18, who arrived in Sweden seeking political asylum — and, over the course of 18 months, disappeared. The cables, from the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, suggest that disappearances were managed by “organized traffickers residing in other European countries.”
WikiLeaks is also crowd-sourcing the redaction issue, by polling its Twitter followers on whether they favor releasing the remaining cables from its cache without any redaction. Respondent have “favored disclosure at a ratio of of 100 to one,” according to the Guardian.
The unexpected info dump was apparently triggered after WikiLeaks discovered that an encrypted file has been floating around the Internet for months containing the entire database of U.S. diplomatic cables. The password necessary to unlock the files was apparently the same one mentioned by the Guardian in a book published about WikiLeaks in February. (The Guardian has a more complete explanation of the snafu here.) (end excerpt)
rafflaw,
Tonight’s operative word is “de-escalation”, it would seem… 😉
Have a good night, NoWay.
Have a good night, rafflaw…
@rafflaw
I couldn’t come close to insulting you as badly as you do the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces when you accept an allegation as true until proven otherwise.
I don’t have to prove that a god-damned allegation is untrue. The burden is on the accuser, you ignorant pinko.
As a member of the Patriot Guard, I have led the processionals to bury far too many who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. I have put up with the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church. I’ll gladly tell you to piss off before I put up with the likes of you.
As I recall, you lost a son who was in the service of our country. Did he reflect so poorly on the men and women who serve that you consider any allegation made against them to be true until proven otherwise?
anon nurse,
My pleasure.
rafflaw,
Thanks for the assist — you handled it well.
NoWay,
Your question — both it’s content and the way in which you phrased it — speaks volumes…