Under national security laws, Australians' telecommunications metadata must be retained by service providers for two years. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Nov 24 2016 (IPS)

For Australian activist Samantha Castro, it was her association with the non-profit publishing organisation Wikileaks that brought her to the attention of the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

She says she’s been followed, her car has been searched, and that the AFP has filmed and photographed her, along with her children, at protests. She believes that authorities have hacked her email account and computer and are responsible for wiping contacts from her phone.Without public scrutiny, without our eyes, as citizens, on what’s being done in our names, then that’s what authoritarianism looks like." -- Associate Professor Sarah Maddison

“They are putting all this time and effort into psychologically disrupting me in the hope that I will stop doing what I’m doing,” says Castro, an operations coordinator at Friends of the Earth who co-founded the Wikileaks Australian Citizens Alliance in 2010 to support the work of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks works to disseminate official and censored documents and files related to war, spying and corruption. While it has won a range of media freedom awards, its release of sensitive material has raised the ire of governments around the world, including Australia’s.

Castro explains that working with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange – an Australian who remains holed-up in Ecuador’s London embassy, fearing extradition to the United States – resulted in significant attention from authorities.

It was these links with Assange’s organisation which, she believes, led to her house being broken into in 2014. She is adamant that the AFP was behind the break-in.

“The reason for that was information and knowledge from when I was with Wikileaks,” Castro, who did not report the matter to police, told IPS.

She says that although nothing was taken from the house, her keys were lined up on the kitchen table alongside a phone that had been opened up. She took the carefully displayed items to mean that she was being monitored.

“I knew straight away. It was a very clear symbol that they wanted me to know that they knew,” says Castro, adding that she spent “a lot of time” searching her house for bugs.

While the AFP does not comment on ongoing operations, a warrant is required to place a person under surveillance. IPS understands that further court approval is needed to enter a premises to covertly plant a listening device.

“I have felt the wrath of the surveillance state since we founded WACA,” says Castro, whose group changed its name in 2014 to Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance in recognition of a broadening movement.

It is not only activists from non-governmental organisations like WACA who are feeling under pressure. There is a growing sense here that space for the broader civil society to express dissent or call out abuse is being squeezed. Those who speak out risk public vilification, financial loss and jail time.

On his visit to Australia in October, the United Nations special rapporteur, Michel Forst, expressed surprise at the situation. “I was astonished to observe mounting evidence of a range of cumulative measures that have concurrently levied enormous pressure on Australian civil society,” he said.

Among the issues Forst pointed to were the defunding of environmental and indigenous bodies in response to litigation or advocacy work, anti-protest legislation and intensified secrecy laws, “particularly in the areas of immigration and national security.”

Attorney-General George Brandis last year took aim at environmentalists using legal action to further their cause, labelling them “radical green activists” who “engage in vigilante litigation to stop important economic projects.”

The island state of Tasmania has, according to Forst, “prioritized business and government resource interests over the democratic rights of individuals to peacefully protest”. Similarly, legislation passed in March in New South Wales state means that protestors face up to seven years in jail for interfering with mining operations.

Mandatory data retention laws were introduced just over a year ago, purportedly for national security reasons, under which service providers must retain the metadata of Australians’ telecommunications activities for two years.

Twenty-one government agencies can access the data and all can apply for a Journalist Information Warrant in order to identify a reporter’s confidential source.

Paul Murphy, CEO of the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, a journalists’ union, says the profession’s ethics require journalists to protect the identity of their sources.

“Journalists must work smarter to ensure that brave people can tell their stories in confidence and public interest journalism can continue to play its vital role in a healthy, functioning democracy,” he argues.

Those in the higher levels of statutory bodies have not been spared.

Professor Gillian Triggs, President of Australia’s independent Human Rights Commission, has faced ongoing criticism from government ministers since the release in 2015 of her report into the mental and physical health of children in immigration detention.

Then-prime minister Tony Abbott called the report politically motivated and said the commission “should be ashamed of itself”, while Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said that much of the content was “either dated or questionable”.

In October, another cabinet minister urged Triggs “to stay out of politics and stick with human rights”, while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed on Nov.16 that Triggs’ contract will not be renewed when it expires in mid-2017.

Despite the vitriol, Triggs has continued to fight back, a fact that Professor Brian Martin, a long-time whistleblowing activist, says may well inspire others “who might want to resist.”

But there’s a flipside: “You could say that overt attacks, like on Gillian Triggs, provide a warning to others that they better be careful,” says Martin.

Last year also saw the implementation of the controversial Border Force Act, legislation that Forst describes as “stifling”.

In June, a psychologist with extensive experience in the offshore processing centres on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru had his contract immediately cancelled after speaking out on the atrocious conditions in the camps.

Although no charges in relation to the Act have been laid, the secrecy provisions of the law allow for a two-year prison term for any immigration and border protection worker who discloses “protected information”, covering all information a worker obtains in the course of their employment.

Some exceptions apply, such in cases of child or sexual abuse, although whistleblowers are responsible for ensuring that any abuse is serious enough to warrant disclosure.

And in what is being seen here as a significant step for transparency into the plight of asylum seekers held indefinitely in the offshore centres, an amendment to the legislation was quietly posted on the website of Australia’s immigration department in mid-October.

The amendment frees doctors and other health professionals, including nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, from the law’s secrecy provisions.

The government’s concession “is an enormous democratic win,” says Associate Professor Sarah Maddison, co-editor of the 2007 book ‘Silencing Dissent’.

“Without public scrutiny, without our eyes, as citizens, on what’s being done in our names, then that’s what authoritarianism looks like,” she adds.

President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Jun. 4, 2009. In his speech, President Obama called for a 'new beginning between the United States and Muslims', declaring that 'this cycle of suspicion and discord must end'. Credit: White House photo

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

This year, Arab political Islam will be greatly influenced by U.S. regional policy, as it has been since the Obama administration came into office six years ago. Indeed, as the U.S. standing in the region rose with Obama’s presidency beginning in January 2009, so did the fortunes of Arab political Islam.

But when Arab autocrats perceived U.S. regional policy to have floundered and Washington’s leverage to have diminished, they proceeded to repress domestic Islamic political parties with impunity, American protestations notwithstanding.Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

This policy linkage, expected to prevail in the coming year, will not bode well for political Islam. Like last year, the U.S. will in 2015 pay more attention to securing Arab autocrats’ support in the fight against Islamic State forces than to the mistreatment of mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which will have severe consequences in the long run.

Since the middle of 2013, the Obama administration’s focus on the tactical need to woo dictators in the fight against terrorist groups has trumped its commitment to the engagement objective. America’s growing support for Arab dictators meant that Arab political Islam would be sacrificed.

For example, Washington seems oblivious to the thousands of mainstream Islamists and other opposition activists languishing in Egyptian jails.

What is political Islam?

Several assumptions underpin this judgment. First, “political Islam” applies to mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which have rejected violence and made a strategic shift toward participatory and coalition politics through free elections.

Arab political Islam generally includes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and al-Wefaq in Bahrain.

The term “political Islam” does not include radical and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, or armed opposition groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Nor does it apply to terrorist groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and others.

Unfortunately, in the past three years, many policy makers in the West, and curiously in several Arab countries, have equated mainstream political Islam with radical and terrorist groups. This erroneous and self-serving linkage has provided Washington with a fig leaf to justify its cozy relations with Arab autocrats and tolerance of their bloody repression of their citizens.

Repression breeds radicalism

It has also given these autocrats an excuse to suppress their Islamic parties and exclude them from the political process. In a press interview late last month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi forcefully denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and pledged the movement would not enter the Egyptian parliament.

Egypt’s recent terrorism laws, which Sisi and other Arab autocrats have approved, provide them with a pseudo-legal cover to silence the opposition, including mainstream political Islam.

They have used the expansive and vague definitions of terrorism included in these decrees to incarcerate any person or group that is “harmful to national unity.” Any criticism of the regime or the ruler is now viewed as a “terrorist” act, punishable by lengthy imprisonment.

The Dec. 28 arrest of the Bahraini Sheikh Ali Salman, Secretary General of al-Wefaq, is yet another example of draconian measures against peaceful mainstream opposition leaders and parties in the region. Regime repression of these groups is expected to prevail in 2015.

Second, whereas terrorist organisations are a threat to the region and to Western countries, including mainstream political Islam in the governance of their countries in the long run is good for domestic stability and regional security. It also serves the interests of Western powers in the region.

Recent history tells U.S. that exclusion and repression often lead to radicalisation.  Some youth in these parties have given up on participatory politics in favour of confrontational politics and violence. This phenomenon is expected to increase in 2015, as suppression of political Islam becomes more pervasive and institutionalised.

Third, the serious mistakes the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda made in their first time ever as governing parties should not be surprising since they lacked the experience of governance. Such poor performance, however, is not unique to them.  Nor should it be used as an excuse to depose them illegally and to void the democratic process, as the Sisi-led military coup did in Egypt in 2013.

Although Islamic political parties tend to win the first election after the toppling of dictators, the litmus test of their popular support lies in succeeding elections. The recent post-Arab Spring election in Tunisia is a case in point.

When Arab citizens are provided with the opportunity to participate in fair and free elections, they are capable of electing the party that best serves their interests, regardless of whether the party is Islamic or secular.

Had Field Marshall Sisi in 2013 allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi to stay in power until the following election, they would have been voted out, according to public opinion polls at the time.

But Sisi and his military junta were not truly committed to a genuine democratic transition in Egypt. Now, according to Human Rights Watch reports, the current state of human rights in Egypt is much worse than it was under former President Hosni Mubarak.

The U.S. and Political Islam

Upon taking office, President Obama understood that disagreements between the United States and the Muslim world, especially political Islam, were driven by specific policies, not values of good governance. A key factor driving these disagreements was the widely held Muslim perception that America’s war on terror was a war on Islam.

The Obama administration also realised that while a very small percentage of Muslims engaged in violence and terrorism, the United States must find ways to engage the other 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. That drove President Obama early on in his administration to grant media interviews to Arab broadcasters and give his historic Cairo speech in June 2009.

However, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and as drone strikes caused more civilian casualties in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, many Muslims became more sceptical of Washington’s commitment to sincere engagement with the Muslim world.

The Arab uprisings beginning in 2011 known as the Arab Spring and the toppling of dictators prompted the United States to support calls for freedom, political reform, dignity, and democracy.

Washington announced it would work with Islamic political parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda, as long as these parties were committed to peaceful change and to the principles of pluralism, elections, and democracy.

That unprecedented opening boosted the fortunes of Arab political Islam and inclusive politics in the Arab world. American rapprochement with political Islam, however, did not last beyond two years.

The way forward

Much as one might disagree with Islamic political ideology, it’s the height of folly to think that long-term domestic stability and economic security in Egypt, Bahrain, Palestine, or Lebanon could be achieved without including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Wefaq, Hamas, and Hezbollah in governance.

Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

The Arab countries that witnessed the fall of dictators, especially Egypt, will with Washington’s acquiescence revert back to repression and autocracy, as if the Arab Spring never happened.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

As the region is rocked by violence against a backdrop of the rise of radical groups, Jordan’s lesbian gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community fears that new instability in the Hashemite kingdom could lead to increased intolerance towards the community. 

The Jabal Amman historical district, crisscrossed by quaint streets, cafés and art galleries has become a hub for the Jordanian capital’s LGBT community.

“Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences,” says Madian, a local activist. “Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences” - Madian, a Jordanian activist

Despite the absence of any article in Jordanian law that explicitly outlaws homosexual acts, there have been several crackdowns on members of the gay community. “The targeting of the LGBT community is not something that is systematic, but it still happens from time to time,” says George Azzi, head of the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality.

In October 2008, security forces in Amman “launched a campaign that targets ‘homosexuals’,” after security forces verified that they were gathering and meeting up at a park near a private hospital in Amman, according to a study on Law and Homosexuality: Survey and Analysis of Legislation Across the Arab World by Walid Ferchichit.

In the last few years, a few arrests have been made on the margin of private parties. Most of the arrests were made under the vaguely worded indecency law and the need to “respect the values of the Arab and Islamic nation”, although the arrests were rarely followed by formal charges.

The Hashemite Kingdom is an Islamic country, where homosexuality is considered as a sin. “Some members of the LGBT community have even been arrested for satanic worshipping,” notes Madian.

The basic form of social organisation in Jordan is heavily influenced by tribalism, which weighs on social norms and relations between people. “Members of the LGBT community fall prey to discrimination or violence not necessarily at the hand of the state but of society or their families,” says Azzi.

He recalls two members of the gay community who had to be smuggled out of Jordan to escape the wrath of their families who discovered their sexual preferences, and possible death.

Credit: LGBT Jordan on Twitter

“I know of four people at least who were killed in last few years for this reason,” says Madian.

He also says that while some victims have been the target of honour killings, others have been killed by gangs because they had to seek impoverished and dangerous areas for sexual favours to avoid the scrutiny of friends and families.

Nevertheless, despite such individual cases, the topic of homosexuality seems to be increasingly tolerated in Jordan. In 2012, a book called “Arous Amman” (Amman’s fiancée) by Fadi Zaghmout was published, featuring a homosexual character who was driven to marry a woman despite being gay.

Increasingly, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are advocating gay rights and the LGBT community in the country.

“The LGBT community has been able to carve a space for itself in society, while staying away from anything that could raise its profile,” says Adam Coogle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But, with social and cultural mores considering homosexuality a sin and unnatural, advocating rights remains a taboo in the Hashemite Kingdom, and LGBT activism a somewhat difficult task. “We tried organising a few years back by creating an NGO but our application was rejected by the Ministry of Social Affairs on the basis of the indecency law,” says Madian.

Gay activism has also become more challenging today due to the security situation prevailing in the region, worrying both activists and human rights organizations.

With Jordan home to thousands of Salafi Jihadists, it is directly concerned by possible rising numbers of home-grown members of the Islamic State. Members of the gay community fear that renewed insecurity could jeopardise their space in society.

“Nonetheless, members of the LGBT community are not alone in being concerned about Jihadist threats which also target secular people as well as religious minorities,” adds Coogle.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Tarek Mehanna (right) poses for a photograph with his mother and brother at his PhD ceremony. Photo courtesy the Mehanne family.

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Apr 18 2014 (IPS)

Such stigma now surrounds the word ‘terrorist’ that most recoil from it, or anyone associated with it, as though from a thing contagious; as though, by simple association, one could land in that black hole where civil liberties are suspended in the name of national security.

For many Muslim citizens of the United States, such ostracism has become a matter of routine, forcing family members of terror suspects to double up as legal advocates and political supporters for their brothers, husbands and sons.“We are a very tight-knit family, and this has been hell for us." -- Tamer Mehanna

A budding nationwide movement to shed light on rights abuses in domestic terror cases is straining to turn that tide. One of its primary sites of congregation is the patch of concrete outside the New York Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC), where suspects deemed violent are held incommunicado.

But the families that gather at the monthly vigils held there, sponsored by a growing coalition known as the No Separate Justice Campaign, speak of a different side to the story: one that involves the government abusing post-9/11 laws to round up non-violent, law-abiding Muslims for exercising their rights to free speech and religion.

At a Mar. 10 vigil outside the MCC, IPS spoke with Tamer Mehanna, brother of Tarek Mehanna, a Pittsburgh-born pharmacist who is serving out a 17-year sentence in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Prior to his conviction on several counts including material support for terrorism, Tarek spent two years in 23-hour isolation, the MCC in New York being just one of the locations where he was all but prevented from communicating with the outside world.

Advocates say Mehanna’s case represents the ‘separate justice system’ for Muslims, in microcosm.

Tamer recounted how, between 2004 and 2008, the FBI courted his brother, using everything from polite requests to psychological intimidation to convince him to become an informant. When all failed, Tarek was arrested at an airport in New York City on his way to Saudi Arabia.

In addition to shelling out 1.3 million dollars in bail, Tarek’s family was shunned by their community in Massachusetts, spent endless hours in court and even gave up their jobs in order to advocate on his behalf.

“We are a very tight-knit family, and this has been hell for us,” Tamer told IPS. “When my brother was arrested, my mother had to watch her son, a respectable guy, being thrown on the ground and handcuffed like an animal in front of crowds of spectators – it was deeply traumatic.

“The second time he was arrested she was stronger, but it was my father’s turn to break down. Before this happened, I never even saw my father shed a tear,” he added. “But this just crushed him. He fell into a depression, into hopelessness, even lashed out at us for advocating on Tarek’s behalf.”

In their firm belief in Tarek’s innocence, the Mehanna family is not alone. An upcoming study co-authored by members of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF) and Project SALAM (Support And Legal Advocacy for Muslims) documents hundreds of cases of Muslims imprisoned on terror-related charges despite a lack of evidence linking them with any tangible crime.

Former NCPCF Executive Director Stephen Downs told IPS that family members of what he calls ‘political prisoners’ – Muslim citizens tried and sentenced for nothing more than political views or religious beliefs – are deeply traumatised and often isolated.

“They share commonalities,” he said, “of being made to feel unwelcome at their mosques, losing their jobs, having people slip into depression. These outcomes are entirely predictable, but to have them deliberately inflicted on you by your own government is kind of shocking.”

Bi-annual conferences hosted by NCPCF attract 30 or 40 family members, who Downs says cherish the opportunity to come together and be heard, as respectable citizens with genuine grievances.

“They get to talk to the few people in the world who understand what they’re going through,” he said, “because if you haven’t experienced it, you just don’t get it.”

Extreme isolation

Family members speaking to IPS on condition of anonymity said their isolation from the community is nothing compared to the extreme forms of solitary confinement imposed on their loved ones, most of whom are housed in what the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) calls Communication Management Units (CMUs).

According to Alexis Agathocleous, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), CMUs came quietly into existence during the George W. Bush administration, the first in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2006 and the second in Marion, Illinois in 2008.

“These units are quite unparalleled within the federal prison system,” Agathocleous told IPS. “They segregate prisoners from the rest of the population and impose very strict restrictions on prisoners’ ability to communicate with the outside world – this translates to drastically reduced access to social telephone calls and visits, and when visits do occur they are strictly non-contact.”

Of the roughly 80 prisoners held in CMUs, Agathocleous estimates that between 66 and 72 percent are Muslims, despite the fact that Muslims make up just six percent of the federal prison population.

He referred to this significant over-representation as “troubling”, adding, “There seems to be the use of religious profiling to select prisoners for CMU designation.”

Speaking at a rain-soaked vigil outside the MCC in early April, Andy Stepanian – an animal rights activist who spent six months in the CMU at Marion – said the Muslim men he met there were “exceptionally generous and caring.”

“There has not been a single night in the four and a half years since I’ve gotten out that I’ve not either had a nightmare or stayed up for hours wondering, ‘Why was I the lucky one who got out? Is it just because of the pigment of my skin?’” Stepanian said.

In 2010 CCR filed litigation representing several inmates housed in CMUs, challenging both the arbitrary and seemingly retaliatory nature of the designation, which is made worse by the fact that the BoP offers “no meaningful process through which [prisoners] can earn their way out – no hearing, no discernible limit on the amount of time someone can spend in a CMU and no meaningful criteria that a prisoner can work at in order to [gain] their release,” Agathocleous said.

Those fortunate enough to afford the monthly trips out to Indiana and Illinois have recorded their testimony of these tightly controlled visits, painful on both sides of the Plexiglas screens that separate loved ones.

At a recent NCPCF conference, Majida Salem, wife of Ghassan Elashi, recounted how her 12-year-old Down’s syndrome child refused to enter the visitation room at Marion.

“He cried and said, ‘It’s an ugly visit. Baba no touch… it’s bad,’” Salem said. “To me this is so merciless, keeping a man who did nothing but feed widows and orphans locked up in a CMU… for 65 years.”

Excerpt:

Participants at an April 7 candlelight vigil for Shifa Sadequee, a Bangladeshi-American serving a 17-year sentence in Terra Haute, Indiana, stand in the rain outside the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC). Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

The sun is just setting as the group huddles closer together, their faces barely visible in the gathering dusk. Simple, hand-made signs read: ‘Stand for Justice’.

Above them, the fortified concrete tower of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) of New York City rises into the darkening sky, fluorescent lights inside illuminating sturdy steel bars that cling to every window."There are things happening in their cases that are not happening in others, like the use of anonymous juries and secret evidence files." -- Sally Eberhardt

The vigil has drawn a mixed bag of supporters – some have their heads covered, a few are modestly concealed by hijabs, others are simply attired in jeans and T-shirts. Whatever their dress, they have gathered here for one reason – to protest the use of ‘lawfare’ on Muslim citizens accused of terror-related activity.

Sally Eberhardt, a researcher with Educators for Civil Liberties, tells IPS these monthly vigils began in 2009 to highlight legal irregularities in the case against Fahad Hashmi, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2005 and became the first citizen to be extradited to the U.S. under new laws passed after 9/11.

Hashmi spent three years in solitary confinement at the MCC before ever being charged with a crime. He accepted a government plea bargain of one-count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups and, in 2010, began a 15-year sentence at the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.

Weekly vigils held in the autumn of 2009 through Hashmi’s sentencing gradually attracted civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), along with family members of other incarcerated Muslims, who have now coalesced into a movement known as the No Separate Justice (NSJ) campaign.

“NSJ was an attempt to bring four key issues under one umbrella: surveillance and entrapment; conditions of confinement; fair trial and due process concerns; and free speech and material support charges,” Eberhardt told IPS.

“We feel that when it comes to Muslim terror suspects, the federal government applies a separate level of justice: there are things happening in their cases that are not happening in others, like the use of anonymous juries and secret evidence files that they have no access to.”

Muslim prisoners and pre-trial detainees are also subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a Bill Clinton-era process designed to isolate potentially violent persons by severely restricting their ability to communicate with the outside world.

In 1996 SAMs were applied for a maximum of four months. Now, they can be designated for up to a year, and extended indefinitely at the discretion of the attorney general, a provision families say violate international laws on solitary confinement.

“SAMs are some of the worst things a human could be forced to endure,” Eberhadt said. “In Hashmi’s case, for example, he was only allowed to write letters on three pieces of paper, he could only receive news 30 days after it was published and could barely communicate with his family or lawyers.”

NSJ has red-flagged close to 20 cases of Muslim terror suspects, whose arrests, trials, sentencing and detention are at odds with constitutionally-protected rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and religious freedom.

Among those spotlighted are Ghassan Elashi, a Palestinian activist whose brainchild, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, earned him a 65-year sentence for material support charges in 2009; Houston-born Ahmed Abu Ali, who was tortured for years in a Saudi prison before being handed a life sentence on nine terrorism counts; and the Duka Brothers, three New Jersey men sentenced to life following a costly FBI entrapment operation that is better known as the case of the Fort Dix Five.

‘Lawfare’: Use and abuse of ‘War on Terror’ tactics

Legal experts say the handful of individuals who have received media attention are just the tip of the iceberg of a vast operation to round up Muslims on fabricated or flimsy ‘terrorism’ charges in the name of national security.

Kathleen Manley, legal director of the advocacy group that calls itself the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), says the rise of ‘preemptive prosecutions’ as a weapon in the United States’ War on Terror arsenal is a dangerous development that enables law enforcers to hound anyone whose “beliefs, ideology, or religious affiliations raise security concerns for the government”, without any evidence of an actual crime.

In 2008 the Department of Justice (DOJ) made public a docket containing the names of nearly 400 ‘domestic terror suspects’ – most of them Muslims – compiled in the decade immediately following the bombing of the World Trade Center.

According to Manley, a good “72 or 73 percent of those cases were pure preemptive prosecution, where the defendants hadn’t done anything that could be considered a crime”, but had instead been targeted for their beliefs, religious practices or fears of what they “might” do.

“Another 20 percent of the cases,” she said, “had what we call elements of pre-emptive prosecution, with the accused committing a very minor crime, such as credit card fraud.”

The DOJ’s list is now the subject of a major study, the first of its kind, on domestic terror suspects and the use of laws implemented after Sep. 11, 2001 to prevent terrorist attacks.

Undertaken by volunteers from the NCPCF and Project SALAM (Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims), the study, which will be published this summer, concludes that the “government has used preemptive prosecution to exaggerate the threat of Muslim extremism to the security of the country.”

As the sun finally slipped out of sight behind the wall of federal buildings, several people lit candles and held them up towards the windows of the MCC.

“We’ve come here to shine a light on injustice,” a family member speaking under condition of anonymity told IPS. “It’s only a flickering light now, but it will get stronger.”

Read Part Two here.

Excerpt:

For months, state-run media propaganda in Uzbekistan has warned about the supposedly detrimental effects of foreign media and culture on young people.

Now President Islam Karimov’s administration seems intent on trying to legislate morality.

On Jul. 9, the Uzbek Agency for the Press and Information, the government body responsible for regulating media outlets, announced that “in cooperation with interested state and non-state organisations” it had drafted a bill that would protect minors from information deemed harmful to their “physical and spiritual development”.

Citing vaguely similar legislation adopted in the United States and in EU countries (mostly relating to pornography), the Uzbek agency’s chairman, Amanulla Yunusov, claimed that adopting laws against the distribution of print, audio and video material, as well as computer games, “promoting violence, cruelty, drugs, pornography and other harmful information” would enable Uzbekistan to comply with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such a claim raised the hackles of international human rights activists, who quickly pointed out a stark dichotomy in the Uzbek government’s attitude toward the welfare of its youngest citizens.

When it comes to keeping foreign influences out, the Uzbek government seems ready to take a tough, proactive stance. But when it comes to the domestic economy, specifically the use of forced child labour in the country’s cotton fields, the government is far less interested in the best interests of children.

Observers point out Tashkent has been reluctant to allow an International Labour Organisation mission to inspect whether forced child labour is used during cotton harvesting, despite ratifying the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention in 2008.

School children were not seen in cotton fields during last year’s harvesting, but human rights activists said that teenagers aged 15 to 17 were forced to work in fields in the autumn instead of attending classes. Anticipating likely criticism of their practices, authorities reportedly coerced parents into signing a pledge agreeing to their children’s cotton picking.

The morality bill is expected to be debated in Uzbekistan’s rubberstamp parliament – where its passage is almost certain – by the end of 2013. It builds on earlier efforts by the Uzbek government to limit public access to independent sources of information, especially on the Internet.

Those efforts have been on-going since the country gained independence in 1991. They were significantly expanded following the large-scale killing of mostly peaceful protesters in the eastern city of Andijan in May 2005.

New life was breathed into the government’s desire to shape public attitudes after the beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2010. A massive campaign was launched in the Uzbek media against social-networking sites, the Internet and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), along with foreign cultural imports – elements that the government feared could be used to foment social unrest in the country.

“We must pay attention to the fact that some destructive forces are seeking to control young minds and use the Internet in their own narrow goals, and this leads to negative consequences,” Karimov said in connection with a holiday celebrating media workers in June 2011.

That was two years ago, but the state propaganda barrage has continued. In July 2012 a documentary aired by the Yoshlar state-run television channel described social networking as a tool used by foreign powers to foment colour-coded revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine back in 2003 and 2004 and, more recently, in some Middle Eastern states.

To counter “destructive forces” on the Internet, Uzbekistan, which has been continuously ranked as an “Enemy of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders in the past few years, has developed its own social-networking sites, including Muloqot.uz, Youface.uz (now defunct) and Sinfdosh.uz to “improve the moral and physical health of youth and form high morals”.

The campaign against foreign influence hasn’t been limited to the Internet. In the recent past, authorities have declared war against toys that supposedly represent foreign values, censored rap music and banned five musical acts from singing for undermining Uzbek “moral heritage and mentality.”

In addition, authorities have discouraged the observance of Western-oriented holidays, in particular Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

Internet penetration is steadily growing in Uzbekistan: The number of Internet users increased by over 250,000 to 10.1 million during the first quarter of 2013.

Meanwhile, Karimov has acknowledged that it is impossible to completely seal Uzbekistan off from outside influences.

“The Internet cannot be fenced off by an iron wall or banned – this is unthinkable,” he conceded in a speech in April.

Uzbek media outlets are nevertheless keeping up a steady drumbeat against Western culture. For instance, ahead of the announcement of the morality bill earlier this month, two flagship state channels – Uzbekistan and Yoshlar – carried separate shows on the harms of the Internet and Western influence on Uzbek children.

“There are many websites on the Internet that disseminate false information and we can observe websites that aim to manipulate social consciousness. We can also see websites that aim at racism, discrimination, and cyberterrorism, and aim to deprive people of their historical memory and destroy the historical memory.

“Of course, our young people are surfing these websites when they are using social-networking sites,” MP Shuhrat Dehqonov fumed on the “Munosabat” (Attitude) programme, posted on Uzbekistan TV channel’s website on Jul. 9.

Speaking on the evocatively-titled “Bogeyman on the Screen” programme, posted on Yoshlar’s website also on Jul. 9, actor Hojiakbar Komilov joined ranks with those seeking to hold back the Western cultural tide: “We won’t notice it [influence] right now but children are growing. What nurturing are they receiving? … [Foreign] films show violence, blood and murders. What kind of nurturing will children receive after seeing this?”

Armed with the new bill, the Uzbek government appears to be gearing up for a long battle for the minds of its youngest citizens.

Editor’s note: Murat Sadykov is the pseudonym for a journalist specialising in Central Asian affairs. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Hassan Rouhani’s election as Iran’s new president has garnered much international attention. In particular, Rouhani’s ascendance has raised hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough on the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Reformist leader Mir Hussein Mousavi has been under house arrest since February 2011. Credit: Hamed Saber/cc by 2.0

It would not be surprising for Rouhani to try and find a way out of Iran’s crisis: the enormous damage to the Iranian economy through sanctions is an existential threat to the Islamic Republic.

But often forgotten in the West is the Iranian regime’s other major source of instability: the deep splits caused by the 2009 presidential election and subsequent arrest of three influential reformist leaders, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hussein Mousavi, and his wife Zahra Rahnavard.

Rouhani’s campaign focused not only on improving Iran’s economic condition, but also on lessening the “securitised” atmosphere in Iran, and gaining the release of Karroubi, Mousavi, and Rahnavard. Tehran has been swirling with rumours of their imminent release.

From Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s perspective, the conditional release of Mousavi and Karroubi could begin to heal the regime’s self-inflicted wounds. However, freeing a group labeled as the “sedition” by the regime could also be very risky; it could be viewed as an admission of error by Khamenei and intensify the factional battles within the system.

Iran’s warring political elite have the capability and willingness to sink nuclear negotiations. The resolution of the nuclear crisis does not only depend on U.S.-Iranian relations, but also on other factors including the fate of three Iranian prisoners.

During his campaign, Rouhani appealed to three different constituencies: the ruling conservatives, the reformists, and ordinary Iranian people. A calculating and clever politician, Rouhani managed to win the election without upsetting the delicate political balance in Iran.

Rouhani is a conservative regime supporter, although of a different cut than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He believes in Iran’s system of religious rule, but does not believe in “exporting” the revolution. For him, the Islamic Republic should strengthen itself at home before engaging in foreign adventures.

Javad Zarif, Rouhani’s reported pick for the post of foreign minister, is quite telling in this regard. Zarif, a polished diplomat, helped the United States establish Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government in 2002. He would likely attempt to repair Iran’s relations with the outside world, perhaps including the United States.

Rouhani’s dedication to the reforms espoused by Mousavi, Karroub, and Rahnavard is uncertain. Yes, he would like to decrease repression in Iran and make the people more “prosperous”. But this does not translate into a belief in fundamental reforms.

Most likely, Rouhani would like to see a re-emergence of pre-2009 Iran, in which the left and conservative wings of the Islamic Republic co-existed and worked together in maintaining the revolutionary theocracy.

Nevertheless, the ultra-conservatives within Iran’s political establishment fear his intentions. While labeling him a “principled” revolutionary, they have nevertheless warned him not to include “seditious” figures within his government. These may include officials associated with former President Mohammad Khatami, the bête noir of the ultra-conservatives.

The influential daily newspaper Kayhan, long viewed as the mouthpiece of Iran’s conservative establishment, has been particularly vociferous in its denunciation of the reformists, and not so subtle in its warnings to Rouhani. Other conservatives, such as Judiciary Chief Sadegh Larijani, have also warned of reformist “cobras raising their heads again”.

It appears that Rouhani’s cabinet will mostly include technocratic and moderate conservatives. Influential reformists such as Khatami will likely play a behind the scenes role in advising Rouhani. But what of Mousavi, Rahnavard, and Karroubi?

The husband and wife remain under arrest in their own residence. Reports from Iran indicate that their harsh imprisonment (almost no contact with the outside world) has resulted in serious health issues for them.

Mehdi Karroubi, who is reported to be under arrest at a Ministry of Intelligence safe house, is also reported to be suffering from various ailments. The death of any of them could be a serious blow to the political balance in Iran and Rouhani’s reputation. He has promised to gain their release. Will his government act accordingly?

Rouhani does not command the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; it is likely that the Guards and their chief Khamanei will play the most important role in determining the fates of Mousavi, Karroubi, and Rahnavard. Thus far, the trio has been held in detention without going to trial.

Interestingly, the Guards-linked website Basirat has declared that “If the law is followed, a competent court must look into the crimes of these individuals.” This is one of the few times that the regime has spoken so openly of trying the reformist trio; it fears a trial would give them an opportunity to publicly challenge Khamenei.

However, the establishment has also indicated that it would forgive the reformists if they repented for their “sins”. Could the regime be considering trying the three opposition leaders? This in itself would not be an admission of defeat, but could pave the way for a compromise between the left and the right. As Khamenei has repeatedly stated, national unity is essential for dealing with Iran’s external enemies. And as Khatami has said, the Iranian “people” could forgive the regime if it forgives the 2009 protestors, and by implication the reformists.

Rouhani, Iran’s bridge-maker, could theoretically lay the groundwork for national unity as he attempts to negotiate the nuclear programme. But the bridge he stands on is shaky. It will take much effort by him and his supporters to guide the regime toward stability.

Progress on nuclear negotiations and the lifting of sanctions could help. The most recent U.S. Congressional sanctions against Iran will make Rouhani’s job only harder, and empower the ultra-conservatives. And any domestic and foreign moves viewed as threatening by ultra-conservatives could imperil Rouhani’s presidency. This would not only result in renewed regime infighting, but the collapse of nuclear negotiations.

Regarding negotiations, it is often said that it takes two to tango — the United States and Iran. But in reality, Rouhani’s dance will have many participants, some of whom are more self-interested and treacherous than others. Rouhani’s cabinet selection will be a major indicator of his intentions.

The fate of the long-suffering Karroubi, Mousavi, and Rahnavard could be the most important indicator of all.

Alireza Nader is a senior international policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

Thousands rally in Bahrain in March 2011. Credit: Suad Hamada/IPS

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Aug 1 2013 (IPS)

The special session of the Bahraini National Assembly held on Sunday Jul. 28 was a spectacle of venom, a display of vulgarity, and an unabashed nod to increased dictatorship.

Calling the Shia “dogs”, as one parliamentarian said during the session, which King Hamad convened, the Al-Khalifa have thrown away any hope for national reconciliation and dialogue.

The 22 recommendations approved during the session aimed at giving the regime pseudo-legal tools to quash dissent and violate human and civil rights with impunity. All in the name of fighting “terrorism”.

Watching a video of some of the speeches during the session, one is saddened by how low official political discourse has become. Students of Bahrain yearn for the days when parliamentary debaters were civil and when Shia and Sunni parliamentarians engaged in thoughtful, rational, and tolerant debates despite their political or ideological differences.

In the early 1970s when the Constituent Assembly debated the draft constitution, Bahrainis followed the speeches by their elected and appointed representatives with much respect and hope for the future of a modern, tolerant, and civil society.

Such parliamentarians as Rasul al-Jishi, Jasim Murad, Ali Saleh, Abd al-Aziz Shamlan, Ali Sayyar, Isa Qasim, Qasim Fakhro, and others made their countrymen proud with the quality of debate that characterised Bahrain’s first ever elected parliament.

Even such ministers as Muhammad bin Mubarak al-Khalifa, Ali Fakhro, and Yusif Shirawi participated in those parliamentary debates and worked jointly with elected members to chart a more hopeful future for all the people of Bahrain.

As I sat through those parliamentary sessions in 1973 and followed the lengthy discussions on a myriad of constitutional amendments, I envisioned a democratically prosperous Bahrain for years to come. The National Assembly, however, was dissolved two years later, and the constitution was suspended. Al-Khalifa ruled by decree ever since.

The parliamentary special session last Sunday showed a divisive, intolerant, and fractured country that is rapidly descending into chaos. It’s as if civility, rationality, and moderation have become relics from the past.

King Hamad and the Crown Prince welcomed the recommendations, and the powerful prime minister urged his ministers to implement them immediately; in fact, he has threatened to fire any minister who slows their implementation.

According to media reports, the recommendations were prepared before the meeting and were disseminated to the media a few minutes after the session ended. They were not even debated meaningfully or rationally during the session.

The regime’s fear that Bahrainis would have their own “tamarud” (rebellion) civil disobedience movement to confront the regime on Aug. 14, Bahrain’s actual independence day, drove the timing of the session. The Bahraini opposition hopes to emulate the Egyptian “tamarud”, which indirectly led to Morsi’s removal.

Like other autocratic regimes, whether under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt or Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Al-Khalifa justified the draconian recommendations against all forms of opposition and peaceful dissent in the name of fighting “terrorism” and incitement of “all forms of violence” (Recommendation #3). The regime will likely use these recommendations to ban all peaceful demonstrations and protests.

The regime is prepared, according to Recommendation #2, to revoke the citizenship of Bahraini citizens “who carry out terrorist crimes and those who instigate terrorism”. The regime defines a terrorist as any Bahraini who is suspected of being a dissident or actively advocating genuine reforms. In fact, Recommendation #6 bans “sit-ins, rallies and gatherings in the capital Manama”.

The regime does not seem perturbed by the fact that citizenship revocation violates international legal norms and the Bahraini constitution. In fact, this might be a sinister way for the Sunni al-Khalifa to alter the demographics of the country by depriving the Shia dissidents of citizenship.

Viewing the entire protest movement through the security prism, as the recommendations imply, the regime seems bent on escalating its crackdown against peaceful protest and freedoms of speech and assembly, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.

Under Recommendation #7, the country could soon be ruled under martial law or “National Safety”, as the regime euphemistically calls it.

The recommendations have put the country on a sectarian collision course, have dealt a major blow to peaceful dissent and civil rights, and have raised serious questions in Washington about Al-Khalifa’s commitment to genuine reform.

In a direct rebuke to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Krajeski, Recommendation #11 requests “that all ambassadors to Bahrain to not interfere in the kingdom’s domestic affairs.”

Some die-hard Sunni parliamentarians, with the support of the Royal Court, have urged the regime to expel Ambassador Krajeski from Bahrain, claiming he has been meeting with pro-democracy Shia dissidents. Others have threatened his personal safety.

Still others, with tacit regime support, are hoping the ambassador would be transferred out of Bahrain, much like what happened to political officer Ludovic Hood in May 2011.

At the time, according to the “Religion and Politics in Bahrain” blog, pro-regime Sunni activists demanded Hood’s removal because they claimed he offered “Krispy Kreme doughnuts to demonstrators who had gathered outside the American Embassy” to protest perceived U.S. support for Al-Khalifa.

Now pro-regime Sunni activists are feverishly campaigning against the U.S. ambassador’s public support for human rights and genuine reform in Bahrain. The recommendation curtailing diplomatic activities in the country is squarely aimed at Ambassador Krajeski.

According to Bahrain Mirror, some have advocated banning him from appearing on state media and in pro-regime newspapers, even if the subject he is discussing is gourmet cooking, one of the ambassador’s hobbies!

The anti-Shia and anti-reform underlying theme of the recommendations is a naked display of tribal family autocracy, which Al-Khalifa are determined to preserve at any cost, including tearing the society apart. Adopting these recommendations reflects the regime’s nervousness about the ever-increasing precarious nature of their rule and the unstoppable demands for justice, dignity, and equality.

According to a recently leaked audio recording, Crown Prince Salman was quoted as saying, “The current situation is unsustainable, and the policy we are pursuing cannot continue. People are getting tired, and conditions could worsen any moment. Bigger dangers are threatening our society, and the future is becoming more precarious.”

Washington and other Western capitals should work diligently to disabuse the king and the prime minister of the notion that “securitisation” is the answer to Bahrain’s domestic ills. Engaging with the public on the future of Bahrain, including the Shia majority and the pro-democracy youth movement, is the only way to bring the country back from the brink.

Washington should make it clear to Al-Khalifa that media attacks and threats against Ambassador Krajeski should stop. Whipping the flames of hatred against the U.S. embassy to preserve the regime’s dictatorial rule is a dangerous game, which Al-Khalifa cannot afford to engage in.

As a first and immediate step, King Hamad should muzzle the hotheads in his Royal Court and in the prime minister’s office. In the meantime, the U.S. should initiate serious discussions on how and when to move the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain to a neighbouring country or over the horizon.

Emile Nakhleh, a former Senior U.S. Intelligence Service Officer, is a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World and Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society”.

Party allegiances apparently mean little in the U.S. when it comes to the debate over domestic government surveillance.

A study released this morning by the Pew Research Center, a major U.S. polling agency, revealed that 57 percent of Democrats approve of government spying, along with 44 percent of Republicans.“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties." -- William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution

“There is a real division within each party on this issue,” Norman J. Ornstein, a renowned expert on U.S. politics, told IPS.

This was evident in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, when a vote to curtail domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) sundered the Democratic and Republican parties alike.

The vote was the first of its kind to take place since the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which, when published by The Guardian newspaper, exposed a degree of domestic surveillance far greater in scale and scope than was previously understood by the public.

The 217-205 decision to reject an amendment blocking spending on NSA domestic spying was so close that one political commentator called it a “nail biter”. Of the 205 votes in favour, 111 were from Democrats and 94 from Republicans, and of the 217 votes opposed, 83 were from Democrats votes and 134 from Republicans.

“You’re not going to see many votes like this,” says Ornstein, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.

William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, agrees that the outcome was unusual.

“It did not conform to standard party lines but instead saw an unusual coalition of the libertarian right and the liberal left voting against the centres of both parties,” Galston told IPS.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, a research organisation which advocates individual liberties and limited government, told IPS that there are historical reasons for civil liberties being a major issue for members of both parties.

“The libertarian strain is a natural dimension of Republican ideology which was diminished by the immediate reaction to [the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001], and now it is sort of naturally reasserting itself,” says Sanchez.

“[On the other hand,] progressive activists have frequently been the targets of abusive intelligence powers,” he added, citing historical examples of government crackdowns on unions, civil rights groups and other leftist organisations as lessons that help explain Democratic opposition to spying.

Rising Tide

Both Ornstein and Galston told IPS that the narrow decision in congress was reflective of public opinion.

“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties,” says Galston.

U.S. citizens, Ornstein told IPS, are “strongly divided as a whole”.

Indeed, the Pew poll indicates more U.S. citizens favour being surveilled by their own government, but only by a slim margin.

Of the 1480 adults surveyed, 50 percent overall said they approved of the domestic surveillance programme, while 44 percent actually said they disapproved.

In a separate question, 56 percent agreed that federal courts have failed to impose adequate limits on intelligence gathering.

Based on the Pew findings, age and gender seem to be factors in where citizens stand on the issue.

By a ratio of about two-to-one, 60 to 29 percent, young respondents said they were more concerned about the government doing too much to weaken civil liberties than they were about it doing too little to defend the nation from terror. In terms of gender, 51 percent of men agreed with this statement, as opposed to only 29 percent of women.

In the report, Pew concludes that the views of U.S. citizens on this issue are “complex”, a conclusion based in part on the relative lack of correlation with party leanings.

Spill Over

Ornstein believes that the cross-cutting divide splitting both major parties is “issue-specific” and unlikely to spill over into other major controversies, for example on social issues such as spending on health care.

To an extent, Galston agrees.

“The liberal left has strict views on economic questions that are poles apart from the views of the libertarians,” Galston says, “and it would be very hard for them to find common ground.”

Liberal Democrats, Galston explains, would have difficulty accepting the small-government solutions often championed by libertarian Republicans.

He notes, however, that more legislation on government spying will take place in the foreseeable future, and that the closeness of Wednesday’s vote was indicative of a strengthening bipartisan opposition to intrusive government tactics.

Cato’s Sanchez believes this like-mindedness could spill over into over issues, namely those related to civil liberties.

“There are civil libertarian wings of both parties, so I expect we could see cooperation on other things, such as free speech issues,” Sanchez says.

It is widely speculated that the de facto leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, Senator Rand Paul, will make a run for the presidency in 2016. One early poll has placed him as the current top contender for the Republican nomination.

Galston told IPS that this issue has opened the way for “conversation” between Paul’s faction of the right and the liberal left.

“Now that they’ve discovered each other, there is likely to be more conversation across party lines,” says Galston.  “This is probably a beginning rather than an end.”

A shrine to the victims of the Boston bombing. Credit: Vjeran Pavic/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 22 2013 (IPS)

Civil liberties and human rights groups are applauding the White House’s announcement Monday that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the lone surviving suspect in last week’s bombing in Boston, will not be charged as an enemy combatant, as some conservative politicians here had been urging.

The widely debated legal designation would have allowed for a much lengthier detention – potentially indefinitely – and would also have imposed fewer qualifications on the government’s ability to interrogate Tsarnaev. Some have also suggested that the label could have shifted jurisdiction for the case to the military, though this would have conflicted with Tsarnaev’s rights as a U.S. citizen."There seems to be a false sense that somehow a military response is a stronger response, and that’s really off the mark." -- HRF's Raha Wala

Nonetheless, many groups are decrying the U.S. government’s decision to begin interrogating the 19-year-old Tsarnaev without reading him what are known here as his “Miranda rights”, a due process assurance that requires law enforcement to verbally explain a suspect’s legal rights. These include rights to legal representation and to refuse to answer officials’ questions.

“As to whether he’s an enemy combatant, this was not really a close decision at all,” Raha Wala, a senior counsel with Human Rights First (HRF), a Washington advocacy group, told IPS. “Here we have individuals engaged in criminal terrorist operations, and that should be handled by civilian authorities. It’s hard to see any connection here to ongoing armed conflict or even broader extremist operations.”

The announcement puts an end a fast-rising debate over how to deal with Tsarnaev, who was captured Friday.

“He will not be treated as an enemy combatant,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters Monday. “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice … This is absolutely the right way to go and the appropriate way to go.”

Tsarnaev was charged Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction to injure and kill people, an accusation that could carry the death penalty. Last Monday, Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, allegedly killed three people and seriously injured more than 100 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, where they are said to have set off two homemade bombs made from pressure cookers packed with nails and other metal.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed Friday in a shoot-out with police, while his younger brother was captured, badly injured, after a massive police search.

Thereafter, some conservatives have cited Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s alleged links to militant Islam as a motivating rationale for designating him as an enemy combatant.

“You can’t hold every person who commits a terrorist attack as an enemy combatant,” Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most outspoken advocates of using the designation for Tsarnaev, admitted to the media over the weekend.

“But you have a right, with his radical Islamist ties and the fact that Chechens are all over the world fighting with Al Qaeda … to go down that road, and it would be a big mistake not to go down that road. If we didn’t hold him for intelligence-gathering purposes, that would be unconscionable.”

In Tsarnaev’s case, however, U.S. law appears to be straightforward, given that the suspect, although born in Kyrgyzstan, became a naturalised U.S. citizen last fall.

“Under U.S. law, United States citizens cannot be tried in military commissions,” Carney stated Monday, noting that Attorney-General Eric Holder, the Department of Justice and President Barack Obama’s entire national security team agree with the decision.

Systems that work

Rights groups have excoriated other elements of the administration’s handling of the Tsarnaev case, however. Particular concern is being paid to the decision to proceed with interrogations outside of the ambit of the suspect’s Miranda rights, with officials invoking a recently expanded exemption in cases involving public safety.

“The Miranda warnings were put in place because police officers were beating and torturing ‘confessions’ out of people who hadn’t even been formally accused of a crime. We cannot afford to repeat our mistakes,” Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, said in a statement, noting that this has been the longest such exemption to date.

“If officials require suspects to incriminate themselves, they are making fair trials and due process merely an option and not a requirement. To venture down that road again will make law enforcement accountable to no one.”

As of Monday evening, police reports suggested that Tsarnaev, suffering from a gunshot in the neck, could not speak but had begun initial questioning, reportedly writing down answers to basic questions.

Detainee rights in terrorism cases are particularly polarised today given the recently stepped-up debate over the U.S. military prison in GuantanamoBay. There, new reports suggest that around half of remaining detainees are on hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, which scholars have repeatedly suggested violates international law.

CCR’s Warren explicitly linked the two issues, noting: “Like Obama’s expanded killing programme and his perpetuation of indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, this is yet another erosion of the Constitution to lay directly at the president’s feet.”

Despite President Obama’s failure to follow through on 2008 pledges to close the prison at Guantanamo, the administration is seeing Monday’s announcement as being in line with a broader push against efforts to emphasise military over civilian justice in terrorism cases.

“It is important to remember that since [the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001], we have used the federal courts system to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists,” White House spokesperson Carney noted Monday. “The effective use of the criminal justice system has resulted in the interrogation, conviction and detention of both U.S. citizens and non-citizens for acts of terrorism committed inside the United States and around the world.”

Although President Obama did make early attempts to have some high-profile terror suspects tried in the federal court system, public backlash scuppered the plan. In March, however, the administration decided to have Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former Al-Qaeda spokesperson and son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, put on trial in New York City.

Rights groups have suggested the move offers a new precedent for terrorism-related trials.

“The big dynamic following the Abu Ghaith decision is that the Obama administration is now clearly pushing in the right direction – towards using systems that work,” HRF’s Wala told IPS.

“There seems to be a false sense that somehow a military response is a stronger response, and that’s really off the mark when you look at how terrorism cases have proceeded. Fortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has made lots of advances since 9/11 in handling terrorism cases and avoiding the uncertainties of detention at Guantanamo.”

Rights groups denounced the decision not to pursue prosecutions of CIA officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2012 (IPS)

U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody.

The announcement appeared to mark the end of all efforts by the U.S. government to hold CIA interrogators accountable for torture and mistreating prisoners detained during the so-called “Global War on Terror” launched shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on Sep. 11, 2001.

For rights activists and for supporters of President Barack Obama, it was the latest in a series of disappointing decisions, including the failure to close the detention facility at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They had hoped Obama would not only end the excesses of President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war, but also conduct a full investigation of those excesses, if not prosecute those responsible.

“This is truly a disastrous development,” said Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “To now have no accountability whatsoever for any of the CIA abuses for which there are now mountains of evidence is just appalling.”

“It completely undermines the U.S.’s ability to have any credibility on any of these issues in other countries, even as it calls for other countries to account for abuses and prosecute cases of torture and mistreatment,” she told IPS.

“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognised prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty,” noted Jameel Jaffar, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Today’s decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record.”

In his announcement, Holder suggested that crimes were indeed committed in the two cases that were being investigated by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham but that convictions were unlikely.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The two deaths took place at a secret CIA detention facility known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in 2002 and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison the following year. The victims have been identified as Gul Rahman, a suspected Taliban militant, and Manadel Al-Jamadi, an alleged Iraqi insurgent.

The two were the last reviewed by Durham, who had originally been tasked by Bush’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, in 2008 with conducting a criminal investigation into CIA interrogators’ use of “waterboarding” against detainees and the apparently intentional destruction of interrogation videotapes that recorded those sessions.

In August 2009, Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to include 101 cases of alleged mistreatment by CIA interrogators of detainees held abroad to determine whether any of them may be liable to prosecution.

At the time, he also stressed that he would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the controversial legal guidance given by the Bush administration regarding possible “enhanced interrogation” techniques that could be used against detainees.

Such techniques, which include waterboarding, the use of stress positions and extreme heat and cold, are widely considered torture by human rights groups and international legal experts. As such, they violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), as well as the Geneva Conventions and a 1996 U.S. federal law against torture.

Holder’s position was consistent with Obama’s statement, which human rights groups also strongly criticised, shortly after taking office in 2009 that he did not want CIA officials to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering” to escape prosecution and that he preferred “to look forward as opposed to…backwards”.

In his first days in office, Obama ordered all secret CIA detention facilities closed and banned the enhanced techniques authorised by his predecessor.

In late 2010, Durham announced that he would not pursue criminal charges related to the destruction of the CIA videotapes. Seven months later, he recommended that, of the 101 cases of alleged CIA abuse referred to him, only two warranted full criminal investigations in which CIA officers had allegedly exceeded the Bush administration’s guidelines for permissible interrogation techniques.

Now that Holder and Durham have concluded that prosecutions of the individuals involved are unlikely to result in convictions, it appears certain that no CIA officer will be prosecuted in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prosecutions of Bush officials responsible for authorising the “enhanced interrogation” techniques have also been ruled out.

In 2006, a private contractor for the CIA was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to six years in prison for beating an Afghan detainee to death three years before.

Some commentators suggested that these decisions, including the dropping of the two remaining cases, have been motivated primarily by political considerations. Indeed, HRW director Kenneth Roth wrote in an op-ed last year that “dredging up the crimes of the previous administration was seen as too distracting and too antagonistic an enterprise when Republican votes were needed”.

In a statement Thursday, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee praised Holder’s decision. Republicans protested Holder’s referral of the 101 cases to Durham in 2009.

But rights activists expressed great frustration. Holder’s announcement “is disappointing because it’s well documented that in the aftermath of 9/11, torture and abuse were widespread and systematic,” said Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First (HRF), which has been one of the most aggressive groups in investigating and publicising torture and abuse by U.S. intelligence and military personnel.

“It’s shocking that the department’s review of hundreds of instances of torture and abuse will fail to hold even one person accountable.”

Similarly, the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that Holder’s announcement “belies U.S. claims that it can be trusted to hold accountable Americans who have perpetrated torture and other human rights abuses”.

It said the decision “underscores the need for independent investigations elsewhere, such as the investigation in Spain, to continue”. Victims and rights groups including CCR filed criminal complaints against former Bush officials in Spanish courts in 2009, launching two separate investigations by judges there.

Using grant funding from the Dept. of Homeland Security, UC Berkeley is preparing to buy an armoured vehicle, which it will share with the city. Credit: Gary Dorrington/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

The city of Berkeley, California has long been regarded as a leader in the movements for peace, free speech and civil liberties. But this very city is now poised to follow the lead of hundreds of others around the United States where local police deploy armoured vehicles to fight crime and terrorism.

The University of California, Berkeley police department is using grant funds from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as BearCat. The university will share the BearCat with police from Berkeley and the neighbouring city of Albany, where it will house the vehicle.

Purchasing the vehicle was raised at a Berkeley City Council meeting as part of a larger discussion on the city’s relationship to Homeland Security agencies that award grants and collect information on citizens.

Police Chief Michael Meehan defended the BearCat, telling the council he would have used it last year in a situation where a mentally ill man held off police officers with a gun for several hours. An armoured vehicle would have allowed negotiators to safely approach the suspect, Meehan said, although in this instance, police eventually took the man into custody without incident.

But Daniel Borgstrom, Occupy activist and former Marine, warned the council on Jun. 19 that the vehicle could be used to chill free speech.

“I’m asking, please stay out of this urban warfare stuff,” he said.

While Meehan called the armoured personnel carrier “a defensive resource” without weapons, Councilmember Max Anderson argued that the vehicle has gun ports and that weapons would be easy to supply.

“While we might count [the vehicle] as being protective of officers, they also carry an offensive component that could be misused under certain circumstances,” Anderson said.

No transparency

Citizens and councilmembers also criticised the secrecy with which the purchase was taking place.

Because the vehicle is being purchased by the university, and not a city governed by elected bodies, and because no matching funds were required – which the council would have had to approve – the Berkeley police department was not required to disclose the grant application.

Berkeley citizens found out about it only when the watchdog organisation, Berkeley Copwatch, discovered the project as a result of a Public Records Act request for general information on police equipment, according to Andrea Prichett of Copwatch.

The armoured vehicle has not been publicly discussed in Albany, and no such discussions are scheduled, according to Albany’s city clerk. Occupy Cal activists contacted for this story were unaware that the university was buying the armoured vehicle.

“I feel a certain level of – I have to use the word – betrayal,” attorney Sharon Adams told the council.

Adams works with a community coalition that has been meeting with police over concerns about local Homeland Security agencies, including the Urban Areas Security Initiative that is awarding the university about 200,000 dollars to purchase the BearCat.

“During all this time, police never told us they were going for this armoured tank,” she said.

Militarising cities – and police forces

Since 9/11 and with a surplus of combat equipment, armoured vehicles have become popular in larger higher-crime cities like Oakland, California, as well as tiny crime-free places like Keene, New Hampshire, where just two murders have been reported since 1999.

These armoured vehicles are part of “an alarming increase in militarisation” of the police, said Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.

Stamper explained in a phone interview that, in addition to 9/11, the war on drugs has fuelled the drive toward police militarisation, exacerbating conflict between those targeted – people of color, youth and the poor – and law enforcement.

Once targeted, these communities become the enemy. “We start adding the military nomenclature and the military equipment and military tactics and strategies, and we find SWAT units hitting the house of somebody suspected of having half a bag of marijuana,” he said.

Locally, police militarisation was evident at the Nov. 9, 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, where combat-gear clad police injured peaceful protesters with baton strikes, and on Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, when similarly armed police nearly killed a young former Marine when they fired a tear-gas canister that hit him in the head.

“There’s this mistaken belief, that if we harden the image of the police officers, that will give the forces of law and order more legitimacy,” Stamper said. “What it does, I think, is precisely the opposite.”

When police carry weapons and use chemical agents on non-violent demonstrators, they “appear to be the repressive arm of an oppressive establishment”, Stamper explained. An armoured personnel carrier would serve to reinforce that impression.

A necessary piece of equipment?

However, Stamper allowed, an armoured vehicle can save lives, when used correctly. When Stamper was on the San Diego police force in the 1980s, a man shot and killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant over the course of more than an hour. An armoured vehicle could have ended the event more quickly, he said.

“That was a situation that calls for exactly what I’ve been condemning in our approach to demonstrations,” he said. “You need police officers with ballistic gear, ballistic helmets…you need an armoured personnel carrier, in a situation like that. But you certainly don’t need it when people are peaceably assembling and expressing their first amendment rights.”

Police Chief Meehan acknowledged the growing militarisation of police, noting that in a highly armed society and country like the United States, which has 200 to 300 million gun,”there’s a limited way to protect our officers, especially when you’re talking about gunfire”.

“However much I would love to have something that doesn’t look military that still does the same job, it is what it is,” he argued. “The equipment that is available to us is what we avail ourselves of.”

The question of whether the armed vehicle is necessary remains: the last time Berkeley police officers were killed by gunfire was in the 1970s; no UC Berkeley or Albany officers have been killed by guns, according to the website Officer Down Memorial Page.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington placed the armoured vehicle on next week’s Berkeley council agenda for further discussion. “If this is a joint application that includes the city of Berkeley and the city of Albany, it seems to me that there should be a public vote of the Albany City Council and the Berkeley City Council,” he said.

“It seems to be against the spirit of Berkeley for us to be using it.”