Tag: human rights watch
Human Rights Groups Urge Criminal Investigation Into CIA Torture

Human Rights Groups Urge Criminal Investigation Into CIA Torture

By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama should appoint a special prosecutor to determine if former Bush administration and CIA officials broke the law by having suspected terrorists abducted and tortured in secret prisons by waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods, two leading human rights groups said Monday.

The call by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union was the second proposal for a special investigation issued from a human rights organization since the publication earlier this month of a blistering Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA interrogation program that ran from 2002 until 2007.

“We believe the failure to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation would contribute to the notion that torture remains a permissible policy option for future administrations; undermine the ability of the United States to advocate for human rights abroad, and compromise Americans’ faith in rule of law at home,” Human Rights Watch and the ACLU wrote in a joint letter to Obama.

The letter follows an analysis of the Senate report issued last week by Physicians for Human Rights, which urged Obama to appoint a special commission to examine whether CIA health professionals violated international and U.S. laws prohibiting experimentation on human subjects without their consent.

It’s highly unlikely that Obama will embrace any calls for such investigations. The White House repeatedly has pointed out since the release of the Senate report that a special prosecutor who spent three years looking into possible wrongdoing by the CIA closed the probe in 2011 without finding sufficient “admissible evidence.”

“The Department of Justice actually did conduct a review of the actions of CIA operatives that are mentioned in this report, that there was a career federal prosecutor who was assigned to this case and that this individual conducted an extensive inquiry, and upon looking at the facts in evidence decided not to pursue an indictment,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Dec. 10.

But the ACLU and Human Rights Watch asserted in their letter that a fresh criminal investigation is warranted by new disclosures about the CIA program in the Senate report.

Even if the former special prosecutor, John Durham, had access to the more than 6 million pages of classified CIA cables, emails and other documents reviewed by the Senate investigators, the Senate report “has now synthesized a huge volume of information into a narrative that clarifies the extent and seriousness of criminal conduct,” the groups said.

The United States, they wrote, is obliged as a signatory of international treaties banning torture to “effectively, independently, and impartially investigate all cases of unlawful killing, torture or other ill-treatment, arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance” and prosecute those found to be responsible, they wrote.

The Senate report, written by the majority Democrats, found that the CIA’s use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, extensive sleep deprivation and other interrogation techniques failed to produce any intelligence on imminent al-Qaida attacks and that information gained from detainees was available from other sources.

It also concluded that the agency misled the White House, Congress and the public about the program’s results. CIA interrogators used methods that weren’t approved as legal by the Justice Department and submitted detainees to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” it said.

The agency admitted that mistakes were made. But the CIA, former Bush administration and agency officials and minority Republicans on the Senate committee disputed the findings, contending that the program was legal and produced intelligence that led to senior al-Qaida operatives, including Osama bin Laden, averted terrorist plots and saved American lives.

In their letter to Obama, the two groups said another reason for appointing a new special prosecutor was because there was no evidence that Durham had ever interviewed any former CIA detainees.

“The absence or paucity of victim interviews, particularly when many of the victims remain in U.S. custody, undercuts the credibility of the decision not to indict anyone for torture-related crimes,” they said.

Finally, Durham didn’t examine possible crimes by CIA officials who operated under Justice Department-issued legal guidelines on interrogation, the groups said. The Senate report, it explained, showed that senior agency officials were aware that the interrogation methods were illegal before they ever asked for those guidelines.

“The argument of good faith reliance on (legal) counsel appears inapplicable to some of the officials who were involved in conceptualizing, ordering, and executing these crimes,” said the letter. “We believe that officials who provided legal advice meant to authorize torture should also not benefit from any presumption that they were fulfilling their responsibilities in good faith.”

The need for a new criminal investigation “is made more urgent” because former Bush administration and CIA officials “who authorized the conduct documented in the Senate torture report” have been defending the necessity, legality and effectiveness of the program in news media interviews and opinion pieces, the letter said.

In a related development, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee condemned as “beyond the pale” a report that no punishments will be recommended by a panel appointed by CIA Director John Brennan to review the CIA’s unauthorized infiltration of the computers used by the panel’s Democratic staff to compile the report.

“The CIA’s unauthorized search of computer files and emails belonging to its congressional oversight committee was a massive breach of the separation of powers and very well may have violated federal laws,” retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a former committee chairman, said in a statement.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that the accountability panel of three CIA officers and two agency outsiders was expected to criticize the agency over the search but wouldn’t call for disciplinary action against the CIA officers who were involved.

AFP Photo/Shane T. McCoy

Cuba Diplomacy: Behind Right-Wing Outrage, An Intellectual Void

Cuba Diplomacy: Behind Right-Wing Outrage, An Intellectual Void

Listen carefully to the Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls roaring with outrage over President Obama’s courageous decision to normalize relations with Cuba; listen very carefully, because no matter how long or how closely you listen to them, there is one thing you will surely never hear.

You will never hear a new idea – or any plausible idea – about bringing liberty, democracy, and prosperity to the suffering Cuban people.

Instead, the furious denunciations of the president’s initiative from his adversaries reveal only an intellectual void on Capitol Hill, where the imperatives remain partisan and cynical. Everyone paying attention has known for decades that the frozen relationship between the United States and Cuba has accomplished nothing – except possibly the prolongation of the Castro regime, which has long considered the embargo a plausible excuse for its own economic failures – and viewed the United States as a politically convenient enemy.

Anyone who has visited the island knows that the Cubans wish nothing more than to see the embargo lifted, because they know it has done nothing to advance their liberty or prosperity – just the opposite.

As former president Bill Clinton likes to say, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. (He wanted to normalize relations as president, but the Cuban government clearly didn’t.) The U.S. government has been doing the same thing in Cuba for 54 years, yet the Republicans still don’t think that was long enough. They haven’t explained how or why – or when – their policy will achieve a different result.

Opponents of change have also failed to justify why treating Cuba so differently from other – and in various respects, worse – authoritarian regimes with which we maintain not only vigorous diplomatic relations but massive trading partnerships and even military cooperation. The conduct of those governments is arguably more repressive in important respects; there is, for instance, less religious freedom in China or Saudi Arabia than Pope Francis found in Cuba.

To browse human rights findings from the State Department’s annual reports or the online files maintained by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International is to find at least a dozen countries with atrocious human rights records, from Chad to Turkmenistan. But the United States maintains diplomatic and trade relations with all of them.

Indeed, Republican leaders and businessmen – notably including members of the Bush family – have profited handsomely from investment in countries like China and Saudi Arabia for many years, with scarcely a peep about human rights violations in those places. It is impossible to forget how the first President Bush toasted the Chinese regime, immediately following the massacre in Tiananmen Square – and how his opportunistic family members showed up in Beijing and Shanghai, looking for a deal.

With the liberation of more than 50 political prisoners – along with USAID worker Allen Gross and an unnamed American spy – the Cubans have suddenly improved their human rights performance, while the Chinese continue to inflict horrendous repression and even torture on Tibetans, Uighurs, and Han Chinese who dare to dissent. (Many of our leading Republicans don’t object to torture, of course, unless it is perpetrated in foreign countries. Sometimes.)

House Speaker John Boehner accused the president of making “another mindless concession to a dictatorship.” What seems entirely mindless, however, is his insistence that we dare not abandon an unworkable and destructive strategy. No boycott observed and enforced by one country alone – even a powerful country like the United States – is ever going to prevail.

That is among the reasons why international human rights organizations, always the most consistent and implacable critics of Castro’s abuses, have long advocated engagement rather than embargo. As Human Rights Watch notes on web pages devoted to detailing those abuses, U.S. policy has imposed “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban people” since 1961, “and has done nothing to improve the country’s human rights.”

Not long after the president concluded his historic speech – among the most lucid, logical, and inspiring he has delivered in his second term – a spokeswoman for Amnesty International called his new approach “the best opportunity in half [a] century for human rights change in Cuba.”

Designed to quarantine the Cuban government, the policy that failed for five decades has only succeeded in isolating the United States from the rest of the world. Its end is long overdue.

 

Don’t Use Religion To Cloak Bias Toward LGBT Families

Don’t Use Religion To Cloak Bias Toward LGBT Families

Growing up with two moms in the San Francisco Bay Area, I thought a family was defined by loud dinners, birthday parties, overprotective parents and unconditional love.

Then, when I was 7 years old, a girl in my class told me I couldn’t sit with her and her friends because I wasn’t a “real person.” The reason? I didn’t have a mommy and a daddy — so how could I possibly have been born?

My classmate hardly understood how babies were made, yet she was certain that a family couldn’t be a family if it had two moms. Adults, of course, should know better. Yet, judging from a bill currently before Congress, at least some of the adults representing Americans in Washington don’t understand that families come in many varieties.

The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014 would allow federally funded child welfare service providers in any of the 19 states where marriage equality is the law to deny adoption rights to same-sex couples without fear of losing taxpayer funding.

The bill, written by Senator Michael B. Enzi (R-WY) and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), never specifically mentions same-sex couples, but its intentions are clear. It would bar state governments that receive federal funding for child welfare services from taking any adverse action against an agency based on its refusal “to provide, facilitate or refer for a child welfare service that conflicts with, or under circumstances that conflict with, the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

In some of the states that allow same-sex marriages, faith-based providers have shut down rather than let LGBT parents adopt or foster children. This bill would provide those agencies with a loophole, allowing them to deny services to same-sex couples without repercussion. But cloaking discrimination in the language of “religious beliefs” and “moral convictions” doesn’t change the fact that the law would be discriminatory.

The law’s introduction is disheartening, especially at a time when so much momentum has built for more inclusive laws and policies. I know firsthand the harm that can come to families when laws are inequitable.

When I was 10, I learned that my parents had never gotten married, because same-sex marriage was illegal. That didn’t compute. I had loving, dedicated parents, yet those in power were denying them the right to be a legal family?

The law also denied me a legal relationship with my non-biological mother. She was every bit as much a parent to me, but according to the state she wasn’t my family, let alone my mom. In order for Judy to be allowed to adopt me, my birth mom, Teri, would have had to forgo all her parental rights, and even then the adoption would have had to be approved. It is alarming, in retrospect, to think that if Teri had passed away, Judy would have had no automatic legal right to continue being my parent. That changed in 1999, when the state allowed second-parent adoption in domestic partnerships, a reform upheld by the California Supreme Court in 2003. But in many states, such laws have not been reformed.

Freedom of religion is crucial. But it should never be used as a cover for discrimination, which is exactly what the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act would do. As many as 6 million Americans today have LGBT parents. These are real families entitled to real rights without loopholes. I hope a majority of the U.S. Congress will see this proposed law for what it is: a legislative assault on basic human rights — and on families.

And for those having difficulty figuring out what a family is, just ask any child raised by gay parents — we’ll be happy to tell you.

Julia Bleckner is an associate in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Guillame Paumier via Flickr

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Case Raises Questions About Afghanistan’s Response To Sex Crimes

Case Raises Questions About Afghanistan’s Response To Sex Crimes

By Ali M. Latifi and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — A case stemming from rapes that generated national outrage and brought swift convictions for seven assailants might seem like a milestone in Afghanistan, where such crimes often result in punishment for the women, if there is any punishment at all.
Yet the story of four women raped late last month in Paghman, a lake district 20 minutes outside Kabul, illustrates the complications that still surround sex crimes five years after President Hamid Karzai, at the urging of Western allies, enacted a landmark law prohibiting violence against women.
The women were traveling with male family members in two cars on their way home from a wedding August 23 when they were stopped by armed men, some dressed in police uniforms. The assailants forced everyone out of the cars, robbed them of money and jewelry and raped the women, one of whom was pregnant, by the roadside, reportedly within earshot of their male relatives.
Despite his opposition to capital punishment, President Hamid Karzai assured an angry nation that the perpetrators would be put to death. On Sunday, less than a week after arrests were made, a primary court in Kabul condemned the seven men to death. The men still have the right to appeal.
To many experts, however, Karzai’s forceful reaction and the swift justice meted out by an often uninterested legal system are not signs of progress. For one thing, the defendants weren’t convicted of rape, but of banditry and adultery. The latter charge also implicates the victims though there has been no sign that in this incident that the women will face prosecution.
The case shocked the nation, the experts say, in large part because the women were under the protection of male family members who were overpowered and humiliated so that the men are widely seen as victims as well.
Wazhma Frogh, a Kabul-based women’s rights activist, said the case was an affront to cultural norms that measure a man’s honor by that of the women in his family. “Men in the society who see women as part of their own honor saw this case as an attack on a man’s dignity,” she said.
Human rights activists say the convictions were unlikely to speed up the many other rape cases languishing in Afghan courts and that the death sentences — though they calmed public anger — raised fresh questions about the justice system’s commitment to due process.
Human Rights Watch criticized Afghan authorities, who said the men were not police officers, for allegedly coercing their confessions and offering them little time to prepare a defense. The group also said statements from Karzai’s office demanding the men be executed “further undermined their fair trial rights and the independence of the court.”
“The government’s history of providing justice for rape victims has been so dismal that it is tempting to cheer at any sign of action, including this case,” Heather Barr, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. “But really, this case does more to illustrate the obstacles women seeking justice face than to signal a solution to those problems.”
In Afghanistan, most rape cases occur far from the relatively cosmopolitan capital and usually involve people the victim knows: fathers, cousins, suitors, even religious teachers.
The Paghman case shocked the nation partly because it was perpetrated by strangers and occurred in a district known to most Kabul families as the site of Friday picnics and Persian New Year celebrations.
“It makes me hate my watan,” or fatherland, said Abdol Haq Mansori, a 27-year-old shop owner from Paghman. Of the convicted men, he said: “I would hang them all in public for everyone to see.”
Qamaruddin Shinwari, chairman of the nongovernmental Social Council of Eastern Provinces, said the details of the case appalled the Afghan public. “Rape is always a barbaric act, but this was particularly inhumane,” Shinwari said.
Saeeq Shajjan, a Kabul-based lawyer, said despite problems with the case, the fact that families cooperated with the investigation was a bright spot. “In the past, victims were keeping quiet to protect their family’s sense of pride and honor,” Shajjan said.
Despite questions about the speedy convictions and the lack of rape charges, some Afghans find the verdict to be a long-delayed step toward the implementation of the Elimination of Violence Against Women law, which makes rape a crime. The 2009 law has not been properly enforced, activists say, and last year was the subject of a contentious debate in parliament, with some lawmakers calling unsuccessfully for its protections to be repealed or rolled back.
“This spectacle can’t change the fact that in the vast majority of rape cases — where there is usually a single victim, and often a rapist the woman or girl knows — the government’s response is complete disinterest or, even worse, prosecution of the victim for adultery,” Barr said.

AFP Photo/Raveendran

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