Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Refuse to Tolerate Torture - New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detainees

Refuse to Tolerate Torture By Linda Rigas November 18, 2008 Excerpts from Scott Horton's Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration in Harper's Magazine. This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protestors, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detaineesFrom UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic | 12 November 2008 Press conference video from C-SPAN WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the war on terror, according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley. (Read full article.)

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