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Historians: Stop Bush/Cheney From Destroying Presidential Records

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Thirty-two of the nation’s leading historians have sent letters to congressional leaders calling on them to stregthen the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The effort, led by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Coalition for History, notes that while the PRA requires the administration to preserve presidential records, “it fails to provide an effective means
of enforcing compliance with that requirement.” (View the letters here and here.)

This effort has taken on increased urgency as the Bush administration prepares to leave office and may be ready to expunge the record on its tenure. Bush has already repeatedly manipulated and rewritten open government laws in order to cover up his wrongdoings:

– The White House is “missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office.”

– In 2001, President Bush issued an executive order “allowing former presidents to review executive documents before they can be released.” Last year, however, a U.S. District Judge invalidated the order, ruling that former presidents would be able to “indefinitely” keep their documents secret.

– Bush plans to solicit contributions from foreign donors for his $200 million presidential library, but plans on keeping their identities secret.

CAPAF Senior Fellow Mark Agrast told ThinkProgress that although the “prospects for legislative action during the remainder of the 110th Congress are not promising, we felt it was important to lay down a marker for the next Congress and the incoming administration before this Congress adjourns.”

CREW and several historian organizations are also filing a separate lawsuit today, “asking a federal judge to declare that Cheney’s records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld without proper review.”

Agrast has more here.  Source

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Secret killing program is key in Iraq, Woodward says

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.

The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would “get people killed,” Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

“It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,” Woodward said.

In “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.

National security adviser Stephen Hadley, in a written statement reacting to Woodward’s book, acknowledged the new strategy. Yet he disputed Woodward’s conclusion that the “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was not the primary reason for the decline in violent attacks.

“It was the surge that provided more resources and a security context to support newly developed techniques and operations,” Hadley wrote.

Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote that along with the surge and the new covert tactics, two other factors helped reduce the violence.

One was the decision of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order a cease-fire by his Mehdi Army. The other was the “Anbar Awakening” movement that saw Sunni tribes aligning with U.S. troops to battle al Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward told Larry King that while there is a debate over how much credit the new secret operations should get for the drop in violence, he concluded it “accounts for a good portion.”

“I would somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II,” he said “It’s a ski slope right down in a matter of months, cutting the violence in half. This isn’t going to happen with the bunch of joint security stations or the surge.”

The top secret operations, he said, will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement.”

While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.

“The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed,” he said. “It’s not news to them.

“If you were a member of al Qaeda or the resistance or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” Woodward said. “It is very dangerous.”

CNN

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YOUTHS BEATEN AND RAPED IN BRUTAL IRAQ PRISONS

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

By Jonathan Steele in Baghdad | Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons, sleeping in sweltering temperatures in overcrowded cells without working fans, no daily access to showers, and subject to frequent sexual abuse by guards, current and former prisoners say.

At Karkh juvenile prison, Omar Ali, a 16-year-old who has spent more than three years there, showed the multiple skin sores he and many other fellow inmates have contracted through lying on thin, sweat-soaked mattresses night after night.

“The electricity comes from a generator and it’s only switched on during the two-hour weekly session when visitors come in, and for two or three hours in the evening. We are convinced the guards sell the generator fuel on the black market,” he said.

Daytime temperatures in Baghdad last week averaged 44C (112F). They barely drop below 38C at night. Water supplies in Karkh are spasmodic, and Omar said he was able to shower only once every three days. Boys sleep in four dormitories, averaging 75 inmates in a cell about 5 metres by 10 metres, on double bunks or the concrete floor.

Guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them, Omar alleged. They also break prison rules by lending their mobile phones to boys to ring home, on condition that each time their families top the phone up by $10 or $20. The teaching staff resigned en masse in November because of low pay, according to an international official. As a result, the children lounge around aimlessly with no daytime activities, other than an exercise yard.

Though the boys in the prison have been convicted, international standards for fair trials are never met. “Trials last on average for 25 minutes, no witnesses are called, confessions are used as the only evidence, and court-appointed defence lawyers get the case file on the day of the trial, leaving no chance to consult the defendant in private,” an international adviser in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity.

Omar Ali was 13 when interior ministry special forces raided his house in a predominantly Sunni suburb in October 2004. He and his 14-year-old brother were arrested. A week later the special forces came back and took their father. All three are still in custody.

The ministry is under Shia control and its forces have repeatedly been accused of targeting innocent Sunnis. Sahar Muhammad, the boys’ mother, told the Guardian that when she was able to visit her sons they told her they were beaten repeatedly in the first days of custody and ordered to sign a blank sheet of paper on which charges would be written later.

Raad Jamal was 17 when US forces raided his home in the mixed Sunni and Shia district of Doura in June last year. His mother, Suad Ahmed Rashid, who was with him during the interview, told the Guardian: “During the US raid an American officer told my daughter: ‘Tell your brother to confess he is with al-Qaida so we can send him to Camp Bucca [a US prison near Basra] or else we’ll hand him to the Iraqis and they will torture him’.”

Raad and a friend were taken to a US base and were transferred next morning to the seventh brigade of the Iraqi army’s second regiment. Raad said he and his friend were hung from the ceiling on ropes, beaten with electric cables, and taken for interrogation one by one. “They said everyone who comes here has to confess,” Raad said.

He was then sent to another Iraqi army base. “I stayed there about six months. I didn’t confess anything I didn’t do. They write false statements and ask you to press your thumb on it. I refused but they forced my thumb on to the paper,” he said. At the juvenile court Raad encountered a sympathetic judge.

“The judge did not accept my confession. He said I was innocent but for administrative reasons I would have to go to Tobchi until I was released.” He spent a few months in Tobchi and was released in March.

Last year officials from the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (Unami) visited Baghdad’s Tobchi prison, where children awaiting trial are held. They reported that detainees provided “particularly worrisome allegations of ill-treatment or other abuse of juvenile males, several of whom told Unami they had been beaten and sexually abused while held in the custody of the ministries of the interior and defence prior to transfer to a juvenile facility. Upon examining them Unami observed injuries consistent with beatings.”

The UN found severe overcrowding at Tobchi, with around 400 inmates in a prison with an official capacity of 206. “In some cells juveniles were taking turns to sleep on the floor without mattresses,” the UN reported. The ministry of labour and social affairs (Molsa), which manages the prison, said shortages of funds prevented improvements.

Kadhim Raouf Ali, deputy director general of Molsa’s juvenile department, told the Guardian that inmate numbers in Tobchi had been sharply reduced this year thanks to speeded-up releases under the new amnesty law. There were only 226 inmates now. But he admitted Karkh was still overcrowded. It was holding 315 children while capacity was 250.

Child detainees in US custody in Iraq fare better than those in Iraqi hands, said Shatha Alobosi, an Iraqi woman MP. Former inmates interviewed by the Guardian confirmed that there is less overcrowding and brutality.

Now, as Iraqi pressure mounts for a return of sovereignty, the US has been moving to release all under-18s. In December last year it held 950 children. The current total is 180.

“We anticipate having less than 100 juveniles in detention by the end of Ramadan [later this month], and hopefully release all juveniles to their families before the end of this year,” First Lieutenant Randi Norton, a US military spokesman, said.

The Iraqi Islamic party, the main Sunni party in parliament, takes a special interest in detainees, adult as well as juvenile, since the majority are Sunnis. It gives aid to poor families who have no breadwinner, and has urged the authorities to improve conditions and release prisoners.

“We still have a long way to go. The problem is how to make a major and drastic reform of the judicial system, and change the mentality of officers in the army and police,” its leader, the Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashemi, told the Guardian.

· An Iraqi contributed reporting for this article. Names of inmates and family members have been changed.

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UK activist faces 12 year sentence after RNC protests

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

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