The Washington Independent » syria

Rubio taking a tough stance with Syria

admin — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:50:38 +0000

Sen. Marco Rubio has scheduled a press conference this morning alongside Sen. Joe Lieberman, reportedly to call for the U.S. to get tougher on Syria. #

Rubio appeared on CBS’s “The Early Show” this morning, and said the two senators would be putting forth a resolution calling for the US to sever ties with Syria and pull its diplomats out. He called on President Barack Obama declare that to take “the side of the Syrian people” and declare that the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is “no longer a legitimate one.” #

Rubio has previously called on the United States to “sever ties and recall the ambassador at once.” #

On April 29, President Obama signed an Executive Order imposing sanctions against senior Syrian officials and other government entities responsible for human rights abuses. And last Friday, the White House issued its strongest threat to Syria yet, saying it condemned and deplored the Syrian government’s use of violence in response to ongoing demonstrations. #

The United States believes that Syria’s deplorable actions toward its people warrant a strong international response. Absent significant change in the Syrian government’s current approach, including an end to the government’s killing of protestors and to the arrest and harassment campaigns of protestors and activists, coupled with a genuine political reform process responsive to the demands of the Syrian people, the United States and its international partners will take additional steps to make clear our strong opposition to the Syrian government’s treatment of its people.

“The United States should be the leading voice in the world condemning what’s happening in Syria. We should make it very clear whose side we’re on and we’re on the side of the Syrian people. The second thing that we need to clearly point out and I hope the President will do … is saying that the Assad regime is no longer a legitimate one. Any time the government has to use government forces and army forces to kill unarmed civilians in order to hold on to power … that makes them illegitimate and that’s what’s happening in Syria. And I hope the United States will be a clear voice saying that,” Rubio said. #

Rubio said that he expects the resolution to have “widespread support” and that he hopes the administration will step up to do more. When questioned about whether he thought it would evolve into a military issue, Rubio said, “I don’t think anyone is advocating military action.” #

Rubio also touched on the recent death of Osama bin Laden, saying he had not seen the photos of bin Laden’s body, but had no doubt that he was dead. “If bin Laden’s not dead, why doesn’t he produce a new video proving that he’s not dead? We need to move beyond that right now…I understand why people are curious about [the pictures] but seeing them isn’t the important issue.” #

Obama makes recess appointments, House members complain

Luke Johnson — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:58:52 +0000

President Obama made six recess appointments Wednesday, allowing officials to bypass Senate confirmation to serve for approximately one year. One of those appointments was an ambassador to Syria, a position that had been vacant since 2005 after the Bush administration withdrew the ambassador over suspected Syrian involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut. Syria, which withdrew its forces from Lebanon after the assassination, have since exchanged ambassadors and established embassies.

Incoming Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in a press release, “I am deeply disappointed that the President decided to make such a major concession to the Syrian regime. Using this Congressional recess to make an appointment that has far-reaching policy implications despite Congressional objections and concerns is regrettable.”

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called the appointment of James Cole — whose nomination was previously held by Republicans due to a 2002 report he wrote voicing support for civilian trials for terror suspects — as deputy attorney general “absolutely shocking.”

There’s nothing unusual about recess appointments — they are allowed under Article Two of the Constitution. President Obama has made 28 recess appointments, while President George W. Bush had made 23 at a comparable time in his presidency. Their terms will expire — if the Senate does not confirm them — after the end of the next session of the Senate, which would be December 2011.

When Rendition Victims Can’t Seek Justice

Spencer Ackerman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:29:44 +0000

Via Kevin Drum, the Toronto Star reports that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen captured in 2002 by U.S. officials and sent to Syria for a year’s worth of torture, has lost his appeal for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Center for Constitutional Rights’s Maria LaHood said in a statement that the court ”has effectively condoned torture by denying Maher’s right to seek a remedy. It is now up to President Obama and Congress to apologize to Maher for what the Bush administration did to him, to make clear that our laws prohibiting torture apply to everyone, including federal officials, and to hold those officials accountable.”

An Obama Plan for Mideast Peace?

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:41:02 +0000

An anonymous administration official runs an idea up David Ignatius’ flagpole: Frustrated with the poor-to-intransigent pace of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which are barely at the “indirect” phase, President Obama is considering proposing his own Mideast-peace plan. That’s something the two-state-solution community urged him and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to pursue after last month’s friction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Jerusalem settlements.

Ignatius reports that it would take a wide, regional focus:

The American peace plan would be linked with the issue of confronting Iran, which is Israel’s top priority, explained the second senior official. He described the issues as two halves of a single strategic problem: “We want to get the debate away from settlements and East Jerusalem and take it to a 30,000-feet level that can involve Jordan, Syria and other countries in the region,” as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.

“Incrementalism hasn’t worked,” continued the second official, explaining that the United States cannot allow the Palestinian problem to keep festering — providing fodder for Iran and other extremists. “As a global power with global responsibilities, we have to do something.” He said the plan would “take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security and the requirements of Palestinian sovereignty in a way that makes sense.”

This has apparently come with the aid of foreign-policy greybeards from both parties, like Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sandy Berger, Frank Carlucci, Robert MacFarlane and Colin Powell. The administration certainly leaked that to frame this prospective initiative as a consensus view. (Because, frankly, it is.)

That, and the other specificity cited by Ignatius — the administration could start interagency discussions modeled on the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and unveil a plan by the fall — support the initial judgment that this has already been well-discussed internally. On the other hand, it could be a shot across Netanyahu’s bow, telling him that if he doesn’t take some confidence-building measures — and soon — the Obama administration will launch its own very big peacemaking agenda, and that’s not going to be something Israel will want to be viewed as opposing.

Rendition Case Tests FBI Immunity

Daphne Eviatar — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:00:09 +0000

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Twenty-four-year-old Amir Meshal, the son of Muslim immigrants from Egypt, was a lifelong resident of New Jersey when, after living briefly in Cairo with extended family members, in 2006 he decided to go to Somalia to study Islam and experience living under Islamic law. The country appeared to have stabilized and a new Islamic government was on good terms with the United States.

But Somalia wasn’t as stable as Meshal had thought, and as violence erupted there again in January 2007, Meshal fled, along with many Somali civilians. He was arrested in a joint U.S.-Kenyan-Ethiopian operation along the border of Kenya.

[Law1]During the next four months, Meshal says, he was detained and interrogated in three different African countries without charge, denied the right to speak to a lawyer or family member, and refused the right to even appear before a judicial officer. Although a lifelong U.S. citizen with two U.S. citizen parents, Meshal was repeatedly threatened with torture, rendition to another country where he would be tortured, and forced disappearance. And he believes that U.S. officials, who interrogated him more than 30 times during this process, directed his arrest and treatment.

Those claims are the subject of a new lawsuit being filed Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Although it’s not the first lawsuit against U.S. officials seeking damages for torture and other mistreatment abroad, Meshal is only the second U.S. citizen to sue for U.S.-sponsored torture. That and a few other distinctive facts in this case may give him some advantages over those that have been dismissed.

“This is a U.S. citizen who was caught in hostilities abroad, and instead of helping him return, U.S. officials abused him and mistreated him and never charged him with a crime,” said Nusrat Choudhury, one of the lead lawyers from the ACLU representing Meshal. “Should they be allowed to do that without helping a U.S. citizen get home, and instead, denying him access to lawyers?”

That’s the question that will face judges in this case. In the past, the government has managed to convince courts to dismiss torture victims’ cases by saying that government officials are entitled to qualified immunity, or that the case would reveal state secrets, or that courts should not imply a right to sue government officials for constitutional violations when the case involves national security and foreign policy. But will courts be so willing to dismiss a case brought by a U.S. citizen, born to U.S. citizen parents, allegedly tortured directly by U.S. officials, and who has never even been charged with doing anything wrong?

American University Law Professor Stephen Vladeck, an expert on constitutional and national security law, says that although doctrinally the cases are not very different, the fact that Meshal is a U.S. citizen “practically, could make a difference to judges,” he said. “It would just highlight how wrong those other decisions are,” he said.

One of those decisions is Rasul v. Rumsfeld, decided by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last year. In that case, the court dismissed the claims of four British men who’d been detained and allegedly abused at Guantanamo Bay because, the court reasoned, the federal officials were entitled to “qualified immunity” because it was not clear that Guantanamo detainees had rights under the U.S. Constitution at the time of their alleged abuse.

In that case, though, which is still on appeal (the Supreme Court remanded it back to the D.C. Circuit for reconsideration in light of intervening Supreme Court precedents), the court’s reasoning was based in part on the fact that the plaintiffs were all “aliens” — none were lawful U.S. citizens or residents.

Meshal’s U.S. citizenship may make his case more difficult to dismiss. “Mr. Meshal alleges there needs to be discovery in this case to determine whether what those officers did was objectively reasonable,” said Choudury, his lawyer. “Should an FBI officer think it’s objectively reasonable to threaten a U.S. citizen to send him to place where he will be tortured?”

Interestingly, recently released documents produced in the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act case against the government have revealed memos written by FBI interrogation specialists in 2002 and sent to Defense Department officials specifically explaining that threatening a detainee with torture, death or disappearance is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and the anti-torture law. That could weaken the government’s argument that FBI officials reasonably thought it was legal to threaten Meshal in 2007.

The most recent case decided that presents similar facts is the case of Maher Arar, dismissed this month for the second time by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested by U.S. authorities while he was changing planes at JFK airport in New York in 2002. Arar was held briefly in the states, denied access to a lawyer, then rendered to Syria where he was held in a grave-like cell and interrogated under torture, he says, for almost a year. He was finally released without charge; Syrian authorities acknowledged that they had no evidence against him.

Arar sued the U.S. government for complicity in his treatment abroad. The court last week ruled that he has no right to sue under the U.S. Constitution in this case because the claims would “have the natural tendency to affect diplomacy, foreign policy, and the security of the nation.” As for his claims under the Torture Victims Protection Act, enacted to protect victims of torture in other countries, Arar could not claim compensation from U.S. authorities because it was the Syrians who tortured him, even if U.S. officials knew that he was likely to be tortured when they sent him to Syria, the court ruled.

In addition to the fact that Meshal is a U.S. citizen, his case may stand a better chance because he is suing the actual FBI officials who he claims conducted his interrogation and threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and execution to coerce him into confessing to associations with al-Qaeda that he says he does not have.

“It was a Kenyan jail, but he is alleging that U.S. officials were complicit with those officials in keeping him detained in secret,” said Choudhury. “During interrogations, U.S. government officials threatened to send him to Israel, where they would make him disappear.”

Meshal’s constitutional claims may also fare better because there appears to be nowhere else to bring them — an important factor courts consider. The government claimed that Arar, as a Canadian, could have objected to his rendition before U.S. immigration authorities. (Arar’s lawyers disputed that.)

In this case, there appears to be no alternative means for redress. Meshal has declined to speak to reporters about his ordeal, but according to his legal complaint, while he was in Kenya, Meshal repeatedly asked to speak to a lawyer, to his father, and to the international Committee of the Red Cross; his requests were denied. He was allowed to speak once to a U.S. consular official in Kenya who said he would help Meshal.

Before the consular official could do anything, though, Meshal was handcuffed, hooded and flown to Somalia, where he feared he would be killed, he says. Meshal was deposited in an excruciatingly hot 25-foot-square cave, without windows or toilets. When guards opened the door of the cell, Meshal “noticed that enormous cockroaches were clustered in the corners of the cell and large black millipedes were all over the walls,” the legal complaint charges. Meshal says he was left there, handcuffed in the dark, for two days.

He was then moved to a storage tent where he was given one meal a day of biscuits, marmalade and water. He was left there for about four days until he was transferred to Ethiopia for further interrogation.

The government could still argue that the “state secrets privilege” should doom the case. In many cases charging government wrongdoing in the national security arena, the Justice Department has argued that allowing a lawsuit to go forward would reveal sensitive state secrets and endanger national security. The government’s frequent invocation of the state secrets privilege has become something of a political embarrassment, however. In February, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a bill, which now has nine co-sponsors, that would severely limit the government’s ability to dismiss cases on that ground. Shortly after, Attorney General Eric Holder in September announced a new policy on state secrets, pledging to use the privilege more sparingly and according to strict new rules. However, he has continued to assert it in situations where advocates say the case should move forward, with the judge simply reviewing any sensitive evidence behind closed doors.

“It seems unlikely the government wouldn’t invoke state secrets again,” said David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University and expert on legal ethics and international law. In this case, Luban said, the government would likely claim that allowing the cases to move forward would expose sensitive information about the United States’ relationships or agreements with the other countries that Meshal was rendered to. And “if the action is being shut off because of state secrets,” he said, “I don’t think you can get around that.”

“The government can raise that in the course of litigation,” Choudhury agreed. “But that’s not a reason for this case not to go forward.” The government would still have to convince a court that national security would be put at risk simply by responding to requests about the FBI’s treatment of one individual and its role in his rendition and alleged torture. Some courts have been skeptical about that argument, although in the case of German citizen Khaled Al-Masri, a lawsuit filed by a rendition victim against U.S. authorities, a federal judge in Virginia did dismiss the case on state secrets grounds.

And the court could still decide to dismiss the case based on its broader national security implications, as it did in Arar. “What’s been so disturbing is how judges have bent backwards to say this is a new kind of claim,” said Vladeck. In the Arar case, for example, the court cast his claim for compensation for extraordinary rendition as a new kind of constitutional claim that would require the court essentially to create a new right to sue. The court then could easily decline to create that new right, citing the “special factors” involved — in particular, the potential impact on national security and foreign policy. “What’s so distressing about Arar was that the Second Circuit endorsed such a limitless view of special factors,” said Vladeck. “If Arar’s rendition case can’t prevail, then I’m pressed to see what kind of case can win.”

Still, one case has survived dismissal so far. That’s the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen deemed an “enemy combatant”, who is now suing John Yoo, the former lawyer at the Justice Department who justified torture and Padilla says personally helped to devise his illegal treatment. Although the Obama administration, representing Yoo, tried to have the case dismissed, a federal court in California refused, in part because there was no other way for a U.S. citizen to hold U.S. officials accountable.

Padilla was also the only U.S. citizen to have sued a U.S. official for torture. Until now. Choudhury hopes, at least, that Meshal’s U.S. citizenship might also make some difference. But the outcome is hard to predict. Judges and courts are sharply divided on when a victim of abusive federal government policies should have a right to bring their claims to court.

When the full Second Circuit court ruled in Arar’s case last week, the decision included four powerful dissents.

“The majority would immunize official misconduct by invoking the separation of powers and the executive’s responsibility for foreign affairs and national security,” wrote Judge Barrington Parker, in one of them. “Its approach distorts the system of checks and balances essential to the rule of law, and it trivilializes the judiciary’s role in these arenas,” he continued. The executive’s powers in foreign policy and national security “are not limitless” and their “bounds in both wartime and peacetime are fixed by the same Constitution,” he wrote. The court’s refusal to allow Arar a remedy, he continued, “immunizes official conduct directly at odds with the express will of Congress and the most basic guarantees of liberty contained in the Constitution. By doing so, the majority risks a government that can interpret the law to suits its own ends, without scrutiny.”

Appeals Court Dismisses Canadian Torture Victim’s Case

Daphne Eviatar — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:13:27 +0000

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.

Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 while changing planes at John F. Kennedy airport in New York and sent to Syria, where he says he was interrogated under torture and kept in a tiny grave-like cell. He was released almost a year later without charge, and with an acknowledgment by the Syrian government that it had no evidence against him.

After conducting its own investigation, the Canadian government confirmed that Arar had done nothing wrong, apologized for its role in providing faulty information to U.S. authorities, and paid Arar about $10 million in compensation for his ordeal. The United States, on the other hand, has never officially acknowledged the error (although former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice once conceded in a congressional hearing that the case had been “mishandled”) and still refuses to allow Arar to enter the country.

Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Arar sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft in January 2004, FBI Director Robert Meuller and other U.S. officials for sending him to Syria where they knew he was likely to be tortured. Today, the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard the case en banc in a dramatic 2-hour oral argument last December, ruled that Arar has no right to compensation from U.S. officials.

Although the opinion is long and complex, the essence of the court’s decision is that the lawsuit cannot be allowed to go forward because it would “have the natural tendency to affect diplomacy, foreign policy, and the security of the nation.” As for his claims under the Torture Victims Protection Act, Arar can’t claim compensation from U.S. authorities since it was the Syrians who tortured him, even if U.S. officials knew that he was likely to be tortured when they sent him to Syria.

The case does not bode well for other victims of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” and other abusive interrogation policies, since virtually all of those cases could similarly implicate national security concerns. The other major extraordinary rendition case, brought by five British victims of the policy against a Boeing subsidiary that assisted the CIA, is pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Obama administration recently won a re-hearing in that case, which it seeks to dismiss on the grounds that the litigation itself would reveal “state secrets” and endanger national security.

The Second Circuit judges voted seven to four to dismiss Arar’s case today. In a strongly worded dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote: “I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

Here is the court’s opinion, filed today:

Pressure to Close GTMO Puts Some Prisoners at Risk

Daphne Eviatar — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:11:04 +0000

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, say human rights experts. The men remaining at Guantanamo mostly come from countries that are notorious for torturing prisoners. And the Obama administration has not ruled out returning the men to those places, even though, labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, they could face retaliation back home.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the courts can step in and stop the administration from returning prisoners to countries known to torture. In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal courts have no authority to interfere with where the administration wants to send a Guantanamo detainee. The lawyers on that case, Kiyemba v. Obama, plan to appeal to the Supreme Court this month, but in the meantime, men from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and other countries notorious for abusing prisoners could be returned to those countries over their objections. Their lawyers are now scrambling to try to stop that.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court deferred its decision in a related case on whether to review a ruling that judges have no authority to order Guantanamo detainees released into the United States. The court’s punt came in the case of 13 Uighurs, the Chinese Muslim prisoners who have been cleared for release by the U.S. government but cannot return to China for fear of persecution there. But while the Uighurs in that case have been denied the right to be released into the United States, in a way, they’re lucky; the Obama administration has said it will not return them to China.

To be sure, the administration has also promised not to send any detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. But it has also said that in some situations it will accept “diplomatic assurances” from those countries that it will treat the returning detainees humanely. These are, essentially, promises from a torturing country that it won’t torture a particular individual being sent there. But how reliable are those “assurances” really?

Human rights advocates say they’re not at all.

“The record on diplomatic assurances is extremely poor,” said Joanne Mariner, Director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. “It’s rare we see the text of the assurances, so it’s not clear what they consist of, and whether there’s a post-return monitoring mechanism. But there are some very well known cases in which people were sent to Egypt and Syria with diplomatic assurances, and then were tortured.”

Judy Rabinovitz, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, agrees. “We think there are real problems inherently with the reliability of such assurances and the ability to monitor them,” she said. After all, she noted, most of these countries have signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but they’re still torturing prisoners. “When you have a country that’s notorious for torturing, how can diplomatic assurances be reliable? They know they’re not supposed to torture. They’ve signed a treaty. How is an assurance worth more than a treaty?”

One of the most infamous recent cases of torture following assurances from a foreign government involved the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, arrested at JFK airport and sent to Syria for interrogation, supposedly with diplomatic assurances that he’d be treated humanely. Arar says he was brutally tortured there. Human Rights watch has released several reports on the increasing reliance of the United States and other countries on such “diplomatic assurances,” and documented that in many cases, they have not worked. What’s more, it’s often impossible to know whether an individual returned has been tortured, since the country that returns the prisoner has no credible way of determining how he was treated, and both countries have an incentive to say the detainee was treated humanely.

Technically, the United States is bound by the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not to send people to countries where they face a real risk of torture. (The Bush administration argued those laws did not apply to prisoners held abroad.) But as Mariner explained, that often leads those countries to rely on “diplomatic assurances” to say the risk has been diminished. That’s exactly what the Bush administration said it did when it sent terror suspects for questioning under its “extraordinary rendition” program, and many of those suspects claim they were subsequently tortured.

The choice, says Mariner, is either to trust the discretion of the executive branch, or to have some sort of system for deciding the legitimacy of the prisoner’s fears. The D.C. Circuit ruling eliminated the possibility of the federal courts playing that role. That ruling took effect in early September, clearing the way for the U.S. government to begin to return Guantanamo detainees to countries known to torture prisoners.

The administration announced earlier this week that it has cleared 75 Guantanamo detainees for release. The list includes nine prisoners from Tunisia, seven from Algeria, four from Syria, three from Libya, three from Saudi Arabia, two each from Uzbekistan, Egypt, the West Bank and Kuwait, and one each from Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. None of these countries has a strong human rights record.

About 30 of the prisoners cleared for release fear return to their home countries, said Mariner.

Ahmed Belbacha is one such prisoner at risk. He fled his home country of Algeria in 1999 during a civil war between government forces and a militant Islamic group. A former soldier in the Algerian army, he was at risk from both sides. He sought asylum in the UK, where he worked cleaning rooms in a hotel. In 2001, however, while traveling in Pakistan where he was offered free Islamic education, he was captured by the Pakistani Army and turned over to the U.S. military shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. military deemed Belbacha an “enemy combatant” because he had attended prayer services led by a fundamentalist sheik, travelled on a fake French passport and received small arms training in Afghanistan. Belbacha was sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. But in 2007, the Bush administration decided that he did not pose a threat and cleared him for release. But by this time, Belbacha was afraid to go home; he fears retaliation and torture from both the Algerian government and radical Islamists.

In 2007, Belbacha’s lawyers told the court that they’d learned that the U.S. government planned to return their client to Algeria, and filed an emergency motion asking the court to prevent his transfer. The court ruled it did not have the power to do that, and Belbacha appealed. The court of appeals held off deciding the case though, while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. (It ruled they did last year in Boumediene v. Bush.) In the meantime, the court temporarily enjoined the U.S. government from sending Belbacha to Algeria.

Then, in April, the D.C. Circuit ruled in Kiyemba v. Obama that the courts have no authority over where the government sends the men. Now, Belbacha is worried again, and his lawyers are scrambling to keep the court from issuing an order that will allow the government to transfer Belbacha to Algeria. His lawyers say he’s now even more likely to be tortured by the Algerian government if he returns there because his struggle to avoid transfer there has drawn international attention and support from human rights groups. As his lawyers put in their brief to the court: “He believes that his strenuous and widely-publicized efforts to avoid transfer to Algeria place him in the government’s crosshairs.”

Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking that his case be “held in abeyance” until the lawyers handling the Kiyemba case have an opportunity to file a petition to the Supreme Court, and then until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case. Holding the case off would leave in effect a June 2008 district court order prohibiting the government from transferring him to Algeria.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is vigorously fighting to lift that order, arguing that the D.C. Circuit has already decided that the courts don’t have authority to prevent a detainee’s transfer, and that the government has promised not transfer any detainee to a country where “he is more likely than not to be tortured.”

That’s not sufficient assurance for Belbacha and his lawyers, however. “The U.S. has not assured Belbacha that he won’t be sent back,” said David Remes, Executive Director of Appeal for Justice and a lawyer for Belbacha. As the law stands now, there is no court or independent arbiter to whom Belbacha can appeal.

Human rights advocates say that Algeria’s abusive treatment of two other prisoners recently returned there by the UK raises serious concerns. According to Human Rights Watch, the men were reportedly threatened and beaten in custody. Statements coerced from them were used against them at trial, and both were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees from Libya and Tajikistan who similarly fear persecution if returned home have also asked federal judges to at least temporarily prevent their clients’ transfer until the Supreme Court can consider whether courts have any authority over the administration’s decisions about where to send them.

The Obama administration, in another context, has similarly indicated that it is willing to send people to countries known to torture. In making recommendations on the transfer of terror suspects to other countries for interrogation – commonly known as renditions – an Obama administration task force recommended that renditions be permitted to countries known to practice torture, so long as the administration obtains assurances that the suspect will be treated humanely. Although the Obama administration has promised to monitor and enforce those assurances, Human Rights Watch has found that “monitoring is no panacea” because the prisoners cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. Their reports of abuse to foreign monitors would be easily traceable to them, placing them at serious risk of retaliation.

Iran Beyond Its Borders

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:44:46 +0000

This post is going to get filled, really fast, with irresponsible speculation. So let’s have some fun.

This Washington Post story about the Washington debate over Iran is revealing for two reasons. First, the administration doesn’t seem to be phased by Manichean, inwardly focused arguments through analogy about why President Obama needs to intercede, rhetorically, into the Iranian opposition’s uprising. “We’re trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves,” a senior administration official told the paper’s Scott Wilson. Second, a different quote in the piece indicates the administration doesn’t want to step in the way of a phenomenon that might mean a whole lot of good things for those interests: “There is something particularly authentic about those who are carrying out these demonstrations … The more you keep this in Iranian terms, the better the chances of change.”

That matches background conversations I’ve had with administration people as well, and they typically cash this issue out in terms of the nuclear question. Just check out State Department spokesman Ian Kelly’s minuet with the press yesterday. As with all administration statements on Iran since June 12, Kelly preserves administration options on future-scope negotiations with the Iranians on their nuclear program. Even if the opposition triumphs — and I don’t think we even know what that means — it’s still unclear what that will mean for the nuclear question. Mir Hussein Moussavi’s public statemens indicate a willingness to pursue nuclear energy without weaponization, but who knows what domestic constraints he would be under even if he miraculously becomes president under a system giving the presidency greater foreign policy authority. Still, the nuclear question is the one that really does concern the administration. I think it’s fair to say that administration officials consider a nuclear-armed Iran to be high on its list of foreign-policy disasters.

But what about Iran’s other effects? On the entire Middle East?

And here comes the irresponsible speculation. In 2004, Jordanian King Abdullah came to Washington and warned about a Shiite “Crescent” of Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East. As he saw it, Iran’s inroads into war-torn Iraq had helped ignite a spark of sectarian conflict that benefited Iranian interests and facilitated the expansion of Iranian power in the region. Hezbollah received increased weaponry and funding that aided it in provoking and then battling Israel in the 2006 war. Hamas received weaponry and funding that aided it in taking over Gaza in 2007 and then provoking and battling Israel, much less well, in this past winter’s war. Shiite political parties all types of in Iraq received funding and in some cases weaponry, as Iran opted for a bet-on-all-horses approach to the country’s politics. Syria expanded its bandwagoning relationship with Iran. The rhetoric from Iran grew increasingly bellicose — a contributing factor was being surrounded by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in 2007 Iran briefly took British sailors captive.

There’s so much we don’t know about the Iranian opposition. We don’t know what it would mean for it to take power. We don’t know what constraints on its ability to influence foreign policy would be. We don’t know what its desires for regional and global foreign policy are. We don’t know how its various factions define Iranian interests, or how those definitions conflict with each other. We don’t know what its relationships with the security apparatus would be. We don’t know what its relationship with the millions of Ahmadinejad supporters would be.

But it’s crazy to think that the rise to power of the opposition, as miraculous as that looks on June 23, wouldn’t have some effect on Iranian power in the Middle East. Various Iranian clients would have to reassess their considerations of the strengths of their ties to the regime. Some would have to ask if they’d have the same sort of client-proxy relationship they currently enjoy. Others — Hamas, probably — would wonder whether they’d have a continued relationship with a vastly changed Iran. U.S. partner regimes in the region, consequently, would ask whether Iran remains the threatening, hegemony-seeking entity that they’ve perceived for years.

Again, it’s way, way, way too early to really have an evidentiary basis for any of this. The opposition, of course, still hasn’t won yet, and things are looking bleak and tense. Hussein Ibish may be right that this is “a revolutionary situation,” and so much can happen in revolutions, as deposed revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Bani Sadr can attest. And the Obama administration does not see the Middle East as a canvas in the way that some Bush administration officials did. But the understandable calculus of keeping its focus on what posture is best for addressing the nuclear question shouldn’t obscure the likelihood that if the opposition wins, a significant amount of Middle Eastern politics and diplomacy will change. The direction of that change is unpredictable, but the prospect of its occurrance is fairly strong.

Canadian MPs Call for Compensation for Torture Victims

Daphne Eviatar — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:41:43 +0000

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Canadians seem so much more willing to apologize for their mistakes than Americans do.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a committee in Parliament is planning to recommend that the Canadian government compensate and apologize to three Arab-Canadian men who were imprisoned and tortured in Syria, due partly to information provided by Canadian authorities.

The three men — Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin — were accused of having ties to al-Qaeda, which they all deny. A report by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Frank Iacobucci last year concluded that the three men were tortured, and that Canadian officials’ actions contributed to their treatment.

The cases of these three men, all of whom are now suing the Canadian government, has an obvious parallel with that of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen captured by U.S. authorities while changing planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture in 2002. The Canadian government, after conducting a thorough investigation that found Arar had done nothing wrong, apologized for its role in providing information to U.S. authorities and paid Arar $10 million to compensate for his ordeal.

The United States, on the other hand, has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on its part, and still won’t allow Arar even to enter the country. In December, the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York heard spirited arguments in his lawsuit against the U.S. government.

Arar was not allowed to attend.

Syria Sanctions Remain in Place

Spencer Ackerman — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:22:48 +0000

Not much will stop the right from insisting that the Obama administration’s outreach to Syria is undone by the Syria insurgent “pipeline” to Iraq re-opening, but take a look at this Friday late-afternoon message from the White House about continuing “the blocking of property of certain persons and prohibited the exportation or re-exportation of certain goods to Syria.”

Because the actions and policies of the Government of Syria continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, the national emergency declared on May 11, 2004, and the measures adopted on that date, on April 25, 2006, in Executive Order 13399, and on February 13, 2008, in Executive Order 13460, to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond May 11, 2009. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared with respect to certain actions of the Government of Syria.

My God, a carrot and stick approach! Like a mature administration would present to a distrusted government with whom it was exploring improved relations! The Syrians can do with this what they will, and the administration is gearing to act accordingly.