[Intelforum] Amnesty International Report on U.S. rendition

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From: "Christopher Farmer" <antiluminous at msn.com>
To: intelforum at lists101.his.com
Subject: Re: Amnesty International Report on U.S. rendition
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:28:35 -0400

MODERATOR'S Note (Mike Dravis): Additional contributions to this thread
should substantially address intelligence topics.

**********

>From: Arturo <aquiran at ugr.es>
>To: intelforum at lists101.his.com
>Subject: Re: Amnesty International Report on U.S. renditions
>Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 18:03:16 +0200

Mr. Arturo's comments are in brackets and my responses follow:

[Concerning the Amnesty Int'l report in particular, and the US 
actions in the so-called "war on terror", I would like to make some 
comments: I would like to know the reasons why you think AI is not 
apolitical (aside from the fact that it attacks the US).  AI has 
worked for 40 years to help keep human rights in good standing all 
over the world, from China to Peru. AI has just pointed some ugly 
facts about the US, just like it has done so in the past to many 
other countries.  Incidentally, AI is not alone on that task.  Other 
NGO and international groups like the Red Cross and the European 
Union have also raised doubts about the actions of the US from 
Guantanamo to Afghanistan.  Is the Red Cross also politically biased 
against the US?]

I appreciate the fact that you took the time to bring these questions 
up. The Amnesty International report was not apolitical because it 
sought to distort official U.S. policy in the War on Terrorism. What 
Amnesty International has done is selectively target certain U.S. 
government organizations for criticism where such criticism is 
unfounded. A valid critique is one based on policy. Was the breakdown 
of discipline at Abu Garub official policy? No, it was a breakdown in 
discipline, which was corrected. Amnesty never mentioned in their 
report that once the United States detected through leadership cells 
the policy violations of its prisoner of war facilities, corrective 
action was initiated immediately to do what -- to bring those 
facilities back into the fold with official U.S. policy.

There has never been any demonstrable proof that the United States 
ordered its military forces to violate the human and civil rights of 
prisoners that the U.S. has captured in the War on Terrorism. That 
said, for Amnesty International to make the claims that it is making 
in regards to U.S. handling of prisoners of war, Amnesty 
International should bring evidence that official policy was the 
result of those deficiencies. As an intellectual I want to see policy 
evidence. If I do not see official policy evidence, then the claim is 
sophomoric and leads me to question the report's real motives, which 
I have done.

Before I continue, let me also state that Amnesty International has 
long ago defined U.S. prisoner of war facilities as 'gulags', a claim 
so outrageous that I am left to wonder if Amnesty International is 
staffed by individuals with only 1/2 an education. If Amnesty 
International doesn't know what a real gulag is, how is it possible 
for Amnesty International to perform its own stated mission 
internationally? You know what a 'gulag' is? A modern gulag is a 
communist state-operated prison. That is what a gulag is. In North 
Korea for example, gulags are prisons where North Korean citizens are 
sent against their will when one speck of dust lands on a photograph 
of Kim Jong-Il that every citizen in North Korea was must have in 
their own homes and worship as official state policy. In those very 
same gulags, the North Korean citizen is sent to purposefully die 
there. I point this out because Amnesty International has never 
written about them, when Amnesty's mission is supposedly to be to 
aggressively detect and pursue such perversions violating human 
rights. Amnesty instead attacks the United States when America is the 
leader in safeguarding human rights around the world. On September 
11th, 2001, the United States was the largest contributor of 
humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, even as the Taliban in Afghanistan 
and al Qai'da ordered their terrorist cells to fly civilian passenger 
aircraft into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon the same day.

Amnesty International has a problem with ideology and to me is 
allowing itself to be compromised by ideology when it should be 
apolitical. I suspect that this is due to their core membership since 
they are a sister organization of the OneWorld Network. This means 
Amnesty is fearful of angering members of its organization that it 
receives funds from -- its constituency. Critiquing the United States 
is popular with such groups, but is Amnesty's argument right? It may 
fill Amnesty's coffers, but the organization itself loses 
credibility, which leads to another question:

Are non-profit organizations really non-profit?

Amnesty needs to learn a few things from the ACLU. The ACLU was 
founded by a communist, but in the late 1990s was starting to feel 
the heat from problems that it had with not being apolitical as well. 
So what did the ACLU do? They brought Bob Barr into the fold. That is 
pretty clever. Amnesty needs its own Bob Barr so that it can at least 
try to have a public image that is apolitical. I say that because 
while I disagree with most of the ACLU's revolutionary legal 
exploits, I respect Bob Barr. That means that even though the ACLU, 
to me, is really on the far left, Amnesty is even more so on the far 
left ideologically.

An organization cannot claim to represent "human rights", if the 
organization's definition of human rights and citizenship is 
ideological, right? That is not being 'universal', is it? Amnesty 
needs balance. They need to report on North Korea. Amnesty must 
become apolitical if it is to be credible. Amnesty is only credible 
with 1/4 of the western intellectual population. The left does not 
have a monopoly on human rights issues.

[Agreed.  But their actions are not necessarily legal outside the US 
of A.  If the CIA decides to, say, wipe out Castro or Chavez, you can 
be damn sure many laws, both national and international, would have 
been violated. Using Spanish airspace to conduct what technically can 
be considered kidnapping is still a crime under Spanish law.]

That is a deliberate confusion of international law in regards to 
lawful war. If a platoon of German Landesgrupen during World War II 
penetrated the United States via submarine on the East Coast and set 
up shop in Boston, would the United States treat them as combatants? 
Of course. So would Britain. So would France. So would Spain (am I 
right?).

That does not negate the fact that increasing Muslim populations in 
Europe may apply unseen pressures upon EU politicians to be reluctant 
in such engagements, but we are dealing with combatants in this war 
and the war is transnational. I am open to ideas about it, however. 
If you have a transnational combatant force operating in many 
different nation-states, how would you handle it? Would you let them 
roam free, or would you capture them? Would the platoon of German 
Landesgrupen roam free in Boston, or would they be captured? Would it 
matter to you if they set up shop in London, or Paris, or Madrid?

That is what is at issue here. We are dealing with the question of 
how the modern nation-state opposes transnational terrorism. Amnesty 
International is basically saying that the modern nation-state has no 
right to defend itself from terrorism and that intelligence 
organizations of the modern nation-state also have no right to 
interdict nor gather information about terrorism. Amnesty 
International is also under the opinion that modern nation-states do 
not have the right to conduct rendition through alliances between 
sovereign states to combat terrorism. Do you see anything wrong with 
that? I do. Is the capture of a terrorist combatant really 
'kidnapping' them? If I capture an enemy soldier on the battlefield, 
would I be kidnapping them? I don't think that I would.

So this leads to the critical propaganda venues those organizations 
like Amnesty use to attack U.S. policy. The first venue is that the 
international community has not defined and come to a consensus to a 
very basic definition of terrorism itself. Knowing this, Amnesty can 
then say that terrorism may not be terrorism, and that the United 
States and its friends and allies around the world are in fact 
'kidnapping' individuals in direct correlation to our definition of 
terrorism in some way, and rendering those individuals to different 
locations throughout the world which Amnesty feels is a gross 
violation of those terrorist's human rights. The second venue is that 
the battlefield where the war is being waged is not the traditional 
battlefield and Amnesty can use that deliberate confusion to claim 
that the United States is violating the sovereignty of other 
nation-states in the global community as it captures and secures 
combatants in the War on Terrorism.

Is it logical for Amnesty to do that? Does the new standard of the 
modern battlefield require war between flagged and uniformed military 
forces, or are states taking advantage of these confusions to arm, 
supply and train unflagged terrorist forces to engage the United 
States and the West in war?

[Good for the US military, as the are more a) ethical, or b) careful 
to hide their actions that the CIA.  On the other hand, the world is 
not happy about the events in either Guantanamo or Abu Graib ... both 
under US Military command.]

You're kidding, right? Soldiers that I have led in war have captured 
enemy combatants on more than one continent and those enemy 
combatants were happy that we captured them. No other military force 
in the world treats captured enemy combatants with as much respect 
for their human rights as the United States does. The U.S. military 
also has within it a highly-developed mechanism for dealing with 
discipline issues in regards to the treatment and handling of enemy 
prisoners of war. Now, did the United States use that mechanism to 
deal with the discipline problems at Abu Gurab? Yes, because what 
occured at Abu Gurab was a violation of official U.S. policy and an 
isolated event. The issue of the capture of enemy combatants in a 
transnational war cannot be confused with imaginary human rights 
violations, unless a special interest organization wants to be 
purposefully dishonest. A sovereign nation-state has the right and 
obligation to protect its citizens and property from any and all 
aggressors. The United States respects the human rights of all 
captured enemy combatants. It is official policy and has always been 
the tradition of our country to do so.

[Quite difficult, indeed, as somebody's terrorist is somebody else's 
freedom fighter (which Osama bin Laden was indeed in the 80s).  But I 
don't think you really need a dictionary-like definition to act 
against it.  Many European countries, from the UK to Japan, has 
fought terrorist without that definition.  Which was a problem, as 
the spanish ETA or irish IRA members could gather in the US for refit 
or fund-raising, all under the "it's none of our businees" flag.]

There is no such thing as: "One man's terrorist is another man's 
freedom fighter." There is only lawful and unlawful war and there is 
no moral relativism in evil. Weren't the al Qai'da terrorist cell 
members 'free' when they were living in the United States planning 
and then initiating their attacks against unsuspecting American 
civilians on September 11th, 2001? When the terrorists walked into 
the airports to get on the civilian passenger aircraft flights they 
had planned to hijack on that day, were they not 'free' to do so? 
Were they living in the midst of a totalitarian regime that required 
them to conduct 'terrorism' to secure their own freedom? At the same 
time in Afghanistan under the Taliban, were the Afghanis free or 
living under a totalitarian regime?

[However, the War on Terror is no war except by name.  The military 
is being used, yes, but there's no country to declare war on.  Even 
Irak did get a war declaration, just an invasion.  The fight against 
terror is a big police operation -one so large that entire armies are 
neecded, but still a police operation- against a gang of people 
intent on harming everybody the can get their hands on.  War, as a 
fight of one country against other, has some rules; police action, as 
a fight of law-enforcement bodies against non-law-abiding people, has 
others.  Are we ready to deal with other police actions like we would 
to a foreign country?]

The War on Terrorism is a war. How can it not be a war? We have hosts 
of terrorist organizations that have declared war upon the United 
States. This war is not a 'police action'. The term 'police' is 
derived from domestic law-enforcement actions within a 'city' of a 
sovereign nation-state that has no legal influence over any other 
sovereign nation-state. That is what 'police' means. Police forces 
are not combatants. Police are not professional soldiers. Police may 
be used by modern armies to reconstitute control over captured 
territory as it is transitioned back into the control of a defeated 
nation-state in war.

This is a war. Professional soldiers from professional armies are 
currently deployed to fight it.

[Again, it is not a war, and it is not legal.  The US is using the 
cover of 9/11 to launch military strikes on targets it believes 
harbors terrorists (that Irak had none is a fact to be taken into 
account).  It is not about negating the US the right to defend itself 
against other countries, but about helping the US not to become the 
same menace it's fighting against.]

Are you saying that since the United States went to war against 
transnational terrorism that we have become terrorists ourselves? 
That is laughable.

[The US and the European Union has agreed on some lists on terrorist 
organization, which would help.  There's still the problem that the 
criterion as to why X is on the list is unknown.  Again, what is 
terrorism depends on what side you're looking.  The Bay of Pig 
invaders were both the CIA's freedom fighters are Cuba's terrorists 
and saboteurs.]

Agreeing to politically convenient and expedient lists of terrorist 
organizations is a good first step in the process of defining 
terrorism, but the international community must define terrorism 
itself and unaminously agree to that definition. The reason I say 
that is because terrorist organizations that the European Union does 
not agree are terrorist organizations since those groups slaughter 
Jews from time to time doesn't mean that terrorist organizations that 
kill Jews are not terrorist organizations. Agreeing that evil exists 
only some of the time doesn't make for sound policy. That is why the 
United States had to take the lead and do it on our own with our 
allies.

I think that a great first step in creating sound definitions of 
terrorism would be for the European Union to admit that terrorist 
groups that kill Jews are terrorist groups. It would go a long way 
into creating an international policy-bridge between advancements in 
U.S. law that so outpace European law regarding terrorism issues. 
This would be a good preamble for European law regarding terrorism:

"Terrorism is any act that creates terror. Regardless of origin, any 
human being in the international community that is killed by 
terrorism is a victim of terrorism."

[Well, if you capture an armed man who was fighting against you just 
a moment ago, he's still entitled to a fair trial, lawyer consent, 
the Fifth, etc. His rights are not derived from his actions, but from 
our democratic system.  You cannot just jaim him without those 
rights, without even knowing what are the charges agains him, unless 
we adopt an SS-like view of what law and order should be.]

The same scope of law and institutions of law that tried the Nazi SS 
in Nuremberg are being used in the War on Terrorism, but you are 
saying that we are adopting a Nazi SS view of what law and order 
should be? Are you kidding me?

I am thinking that you are just upset that international law cannot 
define terrorism and therefore international law cannot cope with the 
terrorism question. That means international law has no influence 
over the advancements in counterterrorism law that the United States 
has made since 2001. I personally would really like to see 
international law address the terrorist question and would like to 
see The Hague get more involved, but as an American citizen I don't 
have the influence to bring the European Union up to speed on the 
issue.

Calling us Americans pejoratives like the Nazi SS, ad infinitum, for 
simply outpacing the European Union and special interest 
organizations like Amnesty International in regards to advanced human 
rights law isn't credible.

[Again, no legal war on terror has been declared.  Call then enemy 
combatants, terrorist, never-do-gooders, whatever, they are still 
civilians captured. After all, even war prisoners have some rights 
and protections.]

You must have been asleep when the United States repeatedly declared 
War on Terrorism in the international community for almost the last 
five years. Terrorist organizations, their members, those that 
provide them material and other support to conduct terrorist acts, 
are enemy combatants in lawful war. Those enemy combatants that are 
captured by the United States enjoy human rights protections that 
very few other sovereign states in the international community would 
ever provide them.

[We could as well claim that the US has no moral high ground after 
invading a country with no weapons of mass destruction and no known 
links to terrorism (even Osama bin Laden called for a holy war 
against Saddam Hussein), AND leave alone a country that claims to 
have those weapons (N. Korea). Or after yelling the "you're with me 
or you're against me" call without remembering the many times the US 
has supported terrorism (er, freedom fighting) either by action or by 
omission. And I'm really sorry for behaving so un-american, but for 
once Americans should come out of their shell and accept the fact 
that the world does not spin around them.]

Well, Saddam Hussein said before the U.S. invaded Iraq that U.S. 
cities would "burn by fire". In the fogginess of war you really can't 
blame the United States for taking proactive measures to declare war 
upon hostile states that threaten millions of U.S. civilians. Perhaps 
Saddam Hussein's totalitarian Satrap regime should not have made 
those threats against our free country.

As for your claim that Saddam Hussein had no contacts with Al Qai'da:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Name of God the Merciful

Presidency of the Republic

Intelligence Apparatus

To the respectful Mr. M.A.M

Subject: Information

Our source in Afghanistan No 11002 (for information about him see 
attachment 1) provided us with information that that Afghani Consul 
Ahmad Dahestani (for information about him see attachment 2) told him 
the following:

1. That Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan are in contact 
with Iraq and it that previously a group from Taliban and Osama Bin 
Laden group visited Iraq.

2. That America has proof that the government of Iraq and Osama Bin 
Laden group have shown cooperation to hit target within America.

3. That in case it is proven the involvement of Osama Bin Laden group 
and the Taliban in these destructive operations it is possible that 
American will conduct strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

4. That the Afghani Consul heard about the subject of Iraq relation 
with Osama Bin Laden group during his stay in Iran.

5. In light of this we suggest to write to the Commission of the 
above information.

Please view
 Yours
 With regards

Signature:

, Initials : A.M.M, 15/9/2001

Foot note: Immediately send to the Chairman of Commission

Signature:



.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That letter is one of thousands that the United States seized in 
Iraq. You can read them all here:

http://70.169.163.24/

There are also over 12 hours of audiotape between Saddam Hussein and 
his advisors on how to approach the question of Saddam Hussein's 
weapons of mass destruction programs and stockpiles. That means there 
were or still is weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq all along.

Is that the evidence you were looking for or do you need more?

[And for the record: yes, I'm Spanish, and we're still mourning our 
11-M victims.  But we've not invaded Morocco.]

It was your country's choice not to declare war on terrorism. That 
doesn't mean the United States relinquishes its right to do so. There 
is a chance, for the time being, that Spain will not be subjected to 
further terrorist acts because your country elected a new President 
that said prior to the election that he would drop all western 
support against stopping transnational terrorism. I don't think there 
has ever been a realistic peace through surrender. I hope I am wrong. 
There are times when the sovereign state is threatened by competitor 
states, or in the present, proxy terrorist organizations. There are 
really only two choices for the sovereign state when this happens. 
The first choice is to resist and destroy the competitor and retain 
the viability of the sovereign state and its written or unwritten 
Constitution. The second choice is to surrender to the competitor and 
accept terms.

Be confident that the United States will not accept terms and will 
energetically engage and destroy international terrorism and all of 
the competitors that support it.

Christopher Farmer
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