Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo’s Ongoing Falsehoods in Service of Limitless Government Power

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 by Salon.com
John Yoo’s Ongoing Falsehoods in Service of Limitless Government Power
by Glenn Greenwald


One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week’s Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as “judicial imperialism of the highest order.” To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue.

Yoo, for instance, claims that the Supreme Court in Boumediene allows “an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.” But huge numbers of detainees in U.S. custody weren’t “captured fighting against the U.S.” at all. Many were taken from their homes. Others were just snatched off the street while engaged in the most mundane activities. Still others were abducted while in airports or at work.

Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera camerman who was encaged at Guantanamo for years until being recently released, was simply traveling with an Al Jazeera reporter from Pakistan into Afghanistan to cover the U.S. invasion for his news network when he was stopped by a Pakistani immigration officer, turned over to the U.S., kept in an underground Afghan prison for six months, and then basically disappeared off to Guantanamo, where he remained for years, interrogated not about Al Qaeda, but largely about the operations of Al Jazeera:

Asma al-haj didnt know what had happened to her husband until late 2002, when she received a letter from him explaining that he was in Guantánamo. Around the same time, Al Jazeera issued a press release announcing that an employee was being held at the camp. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld requesting information, but received no reply. For the next three years, little was known about the circumstances of al-Haj’s detention, until early 2005 when he obtained the services of Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer based in Britain. . . .

Al-Haj was detained at a moment when distrust of Al Jazeera was accumulating rapidly at the highest levels of the American government. Before 9/11, Al Jazeera was hailed as a rare independent voice in the Middle East. But after the attacks, while Middle East specialists in the government continued to advocate that the U.S. engage with the network, others in the administration developed an intense hostility toward it. According to numerous former senior administration officials, the major hubs of animosity were the Office of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, particularly the offices run by Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, and Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Many of the highest-profile “War on Terror” detainees who have been held for years with no charges have been similarly “captured,” while unarmed, in the most mundane of circumstances, far away from any “battlefield” — not “captured fighting against the U.S.,” as Yoo misleadingly put it today. U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, for instance, was detained at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/17/9678/

[annabanana]

1. Is he still at large at Berkley?

Can't someone do a Citizen's Arrest or something?

[BridgeTheGap]

2. This A*@ Hole Yoo must be in denial or just lying - the same thing was happening in Iraq

and may still be. Got an occupation force in your country and want to settle an old score? Tell the occupation forces that your mark is actually a terrorist/insurgent. Score settled.