Daily Links #117: Unarmed Black man shot by Sacramento cop

Stephon Clark

• Sacramento, CA: Unarmed black man ^[pictured] shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Meanwhile, the Minneapolis, MN officer who shot Justine Damond turns himself in on murder charges.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Having finally lost their cause to keep their old gerrymandered district map, Pennsylvania Republican officials are now moving to impeach the Democratic justices of the state supreme court who ruled against them.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• New Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner promised big criminal justice reforms. And he’s delivering.

• The 400 residents of Dewey, Delaware must be nothing but hardcore gangbangers, because the town’s 11-officer police force requested, and obtained, 31 military vehicles and other gear through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

• Finally, just a reminder that nine years later, Sean Hannity still still hasn’t been waterboarded as he promised he would be “for the troops”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

What happens to CIA officials who expose torture vs. those who enable it

John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou is a former CIA official who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture program in 2007. For this, he was investigated multiple times by the FBI and was ultimately convicted under the Obama Justice Department and sent to prison for two years.

Gina Haspel is a CIA official who oversaw torture at the “black site” she ran in Thailand and who later destroyed recordings of these sessions to prevent them being seen by Congress. For this, she suffered no penalties whatsoever and was instead regularly promoted, and she’s now poised to become CIA Director.

Kiriakou has an op-ed in The Washington Post where he lays out some truth. You should read it. Here’s the rundown:

[W]hile I went to prison for disclosing the torture program, Haspel is about to get a promotion despite her connection to it. Trump’s move hurts morale among CIA officers who recognize that torture is wrong. It comforts people at the agency who still believe “enhanced interrogation” is somehow acceptable. I spoke with a senior officer this past week who said, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” There’s an attitude of defeatism among opponents of torture.

And the message it sends to our friends and allies (and the countries we criticize in the State Department’s annual human rights reports) is this: We say we’re a shining city on a hill, a beacon of respect for human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and the rule of law. But actually, that’s nonsense. We say those things when it’s expedient. We say them to make ourselves feel good. But when push comes to shove, we do what we want, international law be damned.

The meaning of Haspel’s nomination won’t be lost on our enemies, either. The torture program and similar abuses at military-run prisons in Iraq were among the greatest recruitment tools that al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other bad actors ever had, according to legal experts, U.S. lawmakers and even the militants themselves.

US officials and lawmakers and media talking heads like may like to pat themselves on the back for being a “nation of laws” that has “moral authority” on the world stage, but it’s impossible for anyone outside their borders to hear this and not laugh or groan.

(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

Fox hosts think CIA black site torture criminal is “hero”

Greg Gutfeld

The reactions are coming in to Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel, a career CIA official who ran a “black site” in Thailand and oversaw the torture of prisoners there, to run the agency. Much of them are rightly condemnatory, but there are those who’ll stop at nothing to defend Trump’s every decision and praise anyone he picks, and you already know I’m talking about Fox News, don’t you. Here’s a representative take:

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): I think she should be proud of what she did. […] She has to make decisions that a lot of her critics don't have to make. She answered the call, and that call forces you to make decisions that could put you in jail. So, the thing is, if you are faced with a potential terror attack that could kill thousands, and they say "But if you do this, you go to jail," -- if you follow that order, you are wrong. If you follow the order that puts you in jail, that makes you a hero.

DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): And they save lives.

GUTFELD: And they save lives, so I think she is a hero. And if she was a TV character, she would be a hero, a woman running a black site, that's -- that's -- that's a great character.

You know, I fully expected Fox News talking heads to defend Haspel in spite of her involvement in torture. I didn’t expect them to praise her because of it. But that’s what blind partisanship does – you don’t just excuse the inexcusable, you claim them as your own and try to spin their monstrosity as a gain, even if that makes you as ghoulish as they are.

Funny of Gutfeld to say that Haspel’s actions could have landed her in prison, though. We all know that government officials don’t get punished by their own when they commit crimes; they’re defended and even promoted. Accountability isn’t a word that exists in the US government’s lexicon.

Surveillance perjurer gets off, CIA torture criminal gets promoted [updated]

Update: Some of the claims in this post concerning CIA Director-designate Gina Haspel are hereby retracted. More below.

James Clapper

Almost five years ago, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that the NSA didn’t spy on Americans. This lie was so baldfaced it prompted Edward Snowden to blow the whistle in the first place. Lying to Congress is illegal, yet Clapper still hasn’t been punished for his perjury, or even charged.

And now, with the expiration of the five-year statutes of limitations this past Monday, it seems he never will be. And that isn’t remotely surprising.

Former intelligence chief James Clapper is poised to avoid charges for allegedly lying to Congress after five years of apparent inaction by the Justice Department.

Clapper, director of national intelligence from 2010 to 2017, admitted giving “clearly erroneous” testimony about mass surveillance in March 2013, and offered differing explanations for why.

Two criminal statutes that cover lying to Congress have five-year statutes of limitations, establishing a Monday deadline to charge Clapper […]

Clapper’s problematic testimony occurred a few minutes before noon on March 12, 2013, when he told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly,” in response to a question about whether the NSA was collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans.

Most criminals try to evade punishment by dodging the cops or using masks and online proxies to hide their identity. What they should do instead is work for the government and climb their way to a position of power, at which point they can do all the wrongdoing they want and lie about it under oath, and the corrupt officials and craven politicos around them will make sure they never pay a price.

Gina Haspel

And if their crimes are inhumane enough, they may even get promoted.

When President Donald Trump nominated Gina Haspel on Tuesday to be the next CIA director, he selected a seasoned intelligence officer with decades of experience, but also a key figure in the agency's troubled legacy of using torture as an interrogation tactic.

[…]

From 2003 to 2005, Haspel oversaw the top-secret CIA program where dozens of suspected terrorists were deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins and had water forced down their throats, according to The New Yorker.

While overseas, she also ran a CIA "black site" — or secret prison — in Thailand where suspected terrorists Ab Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002, NBC News confirmed.

[…]

She also assisted with an order to destroy CIA waterboarding videos.

ProPublica has more on Haspel’s torture record, including a telling bit about how she mocked Zubaydah and accused him of faking his psychological breakdown. Whether this was before or after he was waterboarded 83 times in one month is unclear.

The UN Convention Against Torture, which the US is ostensibly bound by, unambiguously demands that any and all torturers be prosecuted. Yet not a single war criminal involved in the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” regime has ever been charged. And now, someone who personally oversaw – and according to the above-linked report, participated in – the torture of detainees at the secret military base she ran is being rewarded with a prestigious job and even more power and influence.

The idea of accountability in the higher echelons of government is so ridiculous, it wouldn’t even pass for a joke.

(via @Snowden; @csmcdaniel, retweet by @KFILE)

---

UPDATE (03/15/18 @ 8:50 PM ET) —

ProPublica has just posted a major update/retraction: Whilst Gina Haspel did run a “black site” in Thailand and oversaw torture of at least one detainee there, she was not involved in the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and she didn’t mock him. She only arrived at the Thailand base and took command there after Zubaydah’s torture had ended. She was, however, involved in the waterboarding of al-Nashiri, and she helped destroy recordings of his and other detainees’ torture sessions on her boss’s orders. Zubaydah was tortured as described, but it was overseen by a different base commander. The original post above is left unchanged.

This correction notwithstanding, Gina Haspel remains a war criminal under the UN Convention Against Torture and the only occupation she’s fit for is that of prison inmate, as with anyone else involved in the Bush-era torture regime.

Daily Links: 12/15/17 – Trump court-blocked on contraception law

• It’s Federal Judge Blocks Trump Law time! Today’s target: Trump’s rule allowing employers not to provide contraception coverage.

• Canadian federal government bans intelligence agencies from using or sharing information obtained from torture … unless it’s “absolutely necessary” because of terrorism or something. I’m sure that’ll never be abused.

• Oh, look, it’s another high-profile Christian official arrested for diddling children.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Australian government introduces new laws to punish people who leak or report on classified documents with up to 20 years in prison.

• German court is the latest to rule that mass communications surveillance is illegal.
  (via @Snowden)

• Meanwhile, the US official in charge of protecting whistleblowers from retaliation was kicked out of his office. But keep talking about those “proper channels” whistleblowers are supposed to use.
  (via @Snowden)

• The Trump admin. bans the CDC from using terms like “fetus”, “transgender” and “diversity” – as well as “evidence-based” and “science-based” – in their official budget documents. The censorious pettiness and sheer stupidity of this is hard to put into words.
  (via @sarahjeong; RT: @Popehat)

• Kudos to the RCMP (the Canadian equivalent of the FBI) for deciding to review 25,000 closed sexual assault cases from 2016 after identifying problems with previous investigations.

• Finally, fresh off smashing their own expensive coffee machines, Trumpinos are now triggering the libs by giving Starbucks their money to make baristas call out “TRUMP MAGA DECAFF CAPP”. I swear, if these people didn’t exist I’d have to invent them.
  (via @fark)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

International court wants to investigate US torture regime

Fatou Bensouda, ICC prosecutor

Here are some facts: The United States tortured people. This is a violation of international law. That same law requires that any nation that knows about torture must prosecute it. The US has so far failed to hold anyone involved in the Bush torture regime accountable.

The Hague’s International Criminal Court is not happy. And they plan to do something about it.

After a decade of collecting evidence, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court announced last week that she will take steps toward a full investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed over the course of the armed conflict in Afghanistan since May 2003. While the process could take years, this development means that, for the first time, U.S. officials could face the specter of indictment by the international court.

The prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, has requested to launch a full investigation into whether a number of actors committed gross violations of international law, including “war crimes of torture and related ill-treatment.” That implicates U.S. military and CIA personnel, as well as private contractors. In a 2016 report, the prosecutor’s office revealed that it had reason to believe that members of the U.S. military “subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity” and members of the CIA “subjected at least 27 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape.”

This could be huge. The ICC encompasses 124 countries, including the entire European Union, so even if the United States (which isn’t a member) doesn’t cooperate (and does anyone expect Trump to?), the Court could still make it virtually impossible for anyone indicted to set foot nearly anywhere on the planet without being immediately arrested.

This is most likely a long shot, given that a) the case needs to be approved, b) arrest warrants need to be issued, and then c) the individuals targeted would need to leave the US for the Court to get their hands on them. But just the thought that criminal proceedings are underway, after President Obama chose to let his country’s torturers off the hook, is reassuring.

This will be very interesting to watch as it develops over the years to come.