As you've probably heard, American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean prison camp. They were convicted of an unspecified "grave crime."
While Pyongyang has not said where the women will serve their time, their future likely includes the possibility of hard labor, starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world's most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."
Ling and Lee may be sent to a "kyo-hwa-so" or re-education reformatory "that is the equivalent of a felony penitentiary in the U.S., as opposed to a county jail or misdemeanor facility," he said.
----------------------- North Korean defector Kim Hyuck, who spent a total of seven months between 1998 and 2000 in a "kyo-hwa-so," said that the percentage of prisoners who die from the harsh conditions would be unimaginable in the west.
"It is not an easy place," he said of the camps. "Centers for men and women are separate. But even [the] women's place is not comfortable at all. . . . When I was in the center, roughly 600-700 out of a total 1,500 died."
Hawk said many of the re-education camps are affiliated with mines or textile factories where inmates labor for long hours, shifts that are often followed by work criticism sessions and the forced memorization of dry North Korean policy doctrine.
The literal meaning of a "kyo-hwa-so" in Korean is "a place to make a good person through education," said Hawk, who interviewed a dozen gulag survivors for his study for a group known as the U.S. Committee for Humans Rights in North Korea.
Kim, 28, who now studies math at a South Korean university, said that escape from the camps is nearly impossible.
The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps is available online.
While traveling with President Obama to Paris this week, ABC News' Jake Tapper took the opportunity to interview ex-Gitmo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene. (A post on a previous interview with Boumediene, who was the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, that gave detainees the right to seek judicial review of their imprisonment is here.) Blogger Glenn Greenwald makes some important points about what this case illustrates and the issues it raises.
The Nigerian families who sued Shell have settled for $15.5 million. The trial was supposed to begin tomorrow. A previous post on the lawsuit, which was about the execution of protesters in the 1990s, and the Alien Tort Statute under which the case was brought, is here.
While a jury has never found a multinational company to be liable for human rights abuses by a U.S. jury, a few others have settled. In December, a federal jury acquitted Chevron in a lawsuit brought by Nigerians for a violent clash on an oil platform off the country's coast.
Today, the parties in Wiwa v. Shell agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.
The settlement, whose terms are public, provides a total of $15.5 million. These funds will compensate the 10 plaintiffs, who include family members of the deceased victims; establish a Trust intended to benefit the Ogoni people; and cover a portion of plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs. The settlement is only on behalf of the individual plaintiffs for their individual claims. It does not resolve outstanding issues between Shell and the Ogoni people, and the plaintiffs did not negotiate on behalf of the Ogoni people.
----------------------
Marco Simons, [EarthRights International] Legal Director, stated, “The courts repeatedly rejected Shell’s efforts to dismiss this case, setting important legal precedents for the continued prosecution of corporations in breach of international law. This reinforces the plaintiffs’ demands that corporations such as Shell safeguard human rights and the environment.”
According to Ret. Major General Antonio Taguba, the author of the Abu Ghraib report, the photos that the Obama Administration decided not to release "show rape." (Foreign Policy's Passport blog has some background.)
Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.
Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.
“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.
“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”
The Atlantic Correspondents blog has a chilling post by Alex Gibney, who made the film "Taxi to the Dark Side" about an Afghan taxi driver who died in American custody at Bagram. He is responding to the way in which some pundits have attempted to equate treatment of detainees with harmless fraternity hijinks.
Well, Ms. Coulter, work on this: is murder a frat prank?
There has been a lot of arcane talk about the memos produced by the Office of Legal Counsel about specific "no-touch" torture techniques which, out-of-context, can sound harmless, if a bit weird.(In one of Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Stephen Bradley, he notes that, while it's OK to strip a detainee naked and make him wear a diaper, one must be careful not to chafe the skin with the Velcro straps when taking them on and off.)
What has been mostly missing from the recent debate about detainee abuse is that over 100 detainees died in custody during the war on terror.Nearly half of those deaths have been classified as homicides.For all sorts of reasons, it's worth looking at one case in particular.It's the story of Dilawar, a 22-year old taxi driver whose murder was at the center of my film, "Taxi to the Dark Side."
-------------------------------
What could have caused such trauma?A criminal investigation revealed that the Military Police at Bagram had pummeled Dilawar's legs with peroneal strikes, an "approved" control measure that the MPs had learned one day in their guard training.It involved slamming their knees into the nerve endings on Dilawar's thighs."It drops 'em pretty good," said one MP.
At first, soldiers told me, they used strikes to control the 122-pound Dilawar because he would often try to take off his hood, perhaps because he suffered from severe asthma.Later, as Dilawar continued to moan and cry out for his mother and father - which MPs, who couldn't understand him, may have mistaken for the signs of a troublemaker - the guards would pummel him with knee strikes over and over again, just to shut him up, or sometimes, for their amusement, just to hear him scream "allah."
-------------------------------
Now, let's move on to the results of Dilawar's interrogation.After all, the "torture-is-tough-but-necessary" crowd maintains that torture always delivers the goods.Let's see what actionable intelligence was obtained: After the third day of trying to find out about the rocket attack, Dilawar's interrogators concluded that he was utterly innocent.Yet the beatings continued for another two days until Dilawar was dead.
To cover-up the fact that the Army had murdered an innocent man, the Army sent his passengers (who had also been incarcerated at Bagram) to Guantanamo.There they sat until March 2004, when military officials concluded that the unlucky passengers "posed no threat" to American forces and sent them, without explanation, back home to the peanut fields of Yakubi.Upon further investigation, it turned out that Afgans who had originally detained Dilawar and his passengers were the very ones who were actually responsible for the rocket attacks on Camp Salerno.They had a record of arresting innocents, proclaiming them guilty and turning them over to US troops in order to curry favor with the Americans.
The level of the public debate is sickening. I'm glad Alex Gibney is pointing that out and moving the focus in a more constructive and meaningful direction. The entire film can be view online. It is heartbreaking but necessary.
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has a great summary and analysis of yesterday's torture hearings from a legal perspective. Some excerpts:
[South Carolina Senator Lindsey] Graham dismisses today's hearing as a "political stunt" because "we would not be having this hearing if we were attacked this afternoon." What this really means is that for all his talk of legality and law and the rule of law, in his view the law means one thing "in the quiet peace of the moment" and something entirely different in the immediate aftermath of a terrorism strike. It's sort of like a national Twinkie defense, but Graham is willing to strap a saddle onto that Twinkie today and ride … and ride and ride.
Former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow is also thinking about how we will all go crazy after the next terror strike when he testifies: "We could be hit again and hit hard. But our decision to respect basic international standards does not appear to be a big hindrance in this fight. ... Others may disagree. They may believe ... that America needs an elaborate program of indefinite secret detention and physical coercion in order to protect the nation. The government, and the country, needs to decide whether they are right. If they are right, our laws must change and our country must change. I think they are wrong."
A former CIA detainee has died in prison in Libya. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was the main source of Bush Administration claims that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical- and biological-weapons training for Al Qaeda operatives. After the US invaded Iraq, he recanted his entire story, stating that he had made it up to stop harsh treatment by his interrogators in Egypt. (He had been sent to Egypt by the CIA under the agency's "extraordinary rendition" program.)
A Libyan newspaper reported that Libi had committed suicide in his cell in a Libyan jail. Human rights workers and Libyan dissidents are demanding an independent investigation into his death.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and prominent critic of the Kaddafi regime, says there were plenty of reasons to question the report that Libi had committed suicide. (The report appeared Sunday in Oea, a newspaper owned by Saif al-Islam, the influential son of Kaddafi, but contained no details about how Libi was supposed to have killed himself.) "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya," Al-Ghwell explains. In the past, he adds, there have been a number of cases where political prisoners are reported to have committed suicide. Then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death. "My gut feeling is that something fishy happened here and somebody in Libya panicked," he says. With the prospect that the Obama administration might release more Bush-era documents about the treatment of CIA detainees, officials in the Kaddafi regime had reasons to be concerned that their "complicity" in the U.S. war on terror would be exposed Al-Ghwell says.
After NEWSWEEK reported that Libi's recanted claims had been the basis for the bogus claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, the Bush administration dropped all official references to Libi. He was conspicuously not among the "high-value detainees" sent to Guantánamo in September 2006 and was later reported to have been secretly shipped back to Libya. Only three weeks ago, on April 27, two workers with Human Rights Watch visited with Libi at the Al Saleem prison. The visit represented the first time any outsiders had been able to see Libi since his original capture by U.S. forces nearly eight years ago. Although Libi had previously been reported to have been ailing from tuberculosis, he appeared to be healthy and had no apparent physical ailments, says Heba Morayef, one of the Human Rights Watch workers present. Morayef says she and her colleague explained to Libi that they wanted to talk to him about the torture he had experienced while in custody. But after a few minutes, Libi grew visibly angry. "Where were you when I was being tortured in an American prison?" he said, according to Morayef. At that point, he walked out—never to be seen or heard from again, until his reported death this week.
Soufan will say that on several occasions his approach elicited high-value information, some involving the role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in masterminding 9/11. By contrast, when the CIA interrogators arrived and began employing harsh techniques, such as nudity and sleep-deprivation, no information was forthcoming, he’ll testify.
“The new techniques did not produce results as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking,” Soufan will say, adding that when he resumed interrogating him with softer techniques, he again started volunteering high-value information, though the previous use of torture made him “harder to reengage.”
This is key, because Soufan isn’t merely undercutting the claim that torture works. He’s saying it was counterproductive.
Soufan will directly contradict key claims by torture apologists that the techniques elicited high-value information. He will say flat out that the claim that Abu Zubaydah didn’t start giving up info until August 2002, when he was waterboarded, is false. “The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him,” Soufan will say.
Soufan will also contradict claims that waterboarding got Abu Zubaydah to cough up info leading to the capture of so-called “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. He will point out that waterboarding wasn’t approved until August of 2002, while Padilla was captured in May of 2002.
And Soufan will deny yet another key claim of torture apologists: That torture revealed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s involvement in 9/11. “That was discovered in April 2002, while waterboarding was not introduced until almost three months later.” Soufan will say.
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, was on Larry King yesterday and he had some scathing criticism of former Vice President Dick Cheney and his torture regime.
A draft report from the Department of Justice recommends disciplinary action for two of the three lawyers who wrote memos justifying the use of torture in interrogation.
Officials conducting the internal Justice Department inquiry into the lawyers who wrote those memos have recommended referring two of the three lawyers — John Yoo and Jay Bybee — to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action, according to a person familiar with the inquiry. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Jay Bybee is now a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and should be impeached. (I was just reading a dissent he wrote in the lawsuit against Rio Tinto, arguing there should be an absolute requirement of exhaustion of local remedies for all lawsuits filed in the US under the Alien Tort Claims... it could be seen as a human rights-unfriendly view, but I digress.)
Another (slightly more related) aside: why are so many journalists tiptoeing around the word "torture"? As in, "liberals who thought he was being too forgiving of practices they — and Obama — call torture." I guess the memos made it seem like a much grayer area than it is.
Andrew Sullivan compares the criteria for "enhanced interrogation" with those for rape. A quote:
"Raping someone need not leave any long-term physical scars; it certainly doesn't permanently impair any bodily organ; it has no uniquely graphic dimensions - the comic book pulling-fingernail scenarios the know-nothings in the Bush administration viewed as torture; and although it's cruel, it's hardly unusual."
Andrew Sullivan posted an update to his post on the use of torture by the U.S., compared with the refusal of the British to use torture during World War II. Darius Rejali, who wrote the book Torture and Democracy, sent Sullivan an e-mail about the "London Cage," saying:
There is a significant difference between the German prisoners in the cage and the German spies captured by the British during World War II. The Germans in the cage were accused of war crimes, and the techniques was used to coerce confessions of guilt. It didn’t matter if what they said was true, and even then the success rate of the cage was terrible.
The Cage held 3573 prisoners. They were accused of war crimes. The techniques were designed to coerce confessions of guilt. But only about 1000 confessions, false or true, were coerced – either by torture or “not torture”. That is 70% refused to confess anything. These are, as I say in the book, surprisingly dismal results but pretty much in line with other dismal results for false confessions including Korean and Chinese torture during the Korean War and French ancien regime torture (which was even poorer). And these are cases where people don’t care if the information is true or false. They just want the confession.
UPDATE: More from Darius Rejali on the the London Cage here.
At last night's press conference, President Obama said the practice of waterboarding is torture.
"What I have said, and I will repeat, is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values," Mr. Obama said. "I do believe that it is torture. I do not think that is just my opinion; that is the opinion of many who have examined the topic. And that is why I put an end to these practices."
"I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat."
"As Britain's very survival hung in the balance, as women and children were being killed on a daily basis and London turned into rubble, Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting."
On the same day that Mr. Cheng [an attorney who defended a Falun Gong adherent] was beaten by public officials, China released “The National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010).” The document is an attempt to respond to criticism by the world human rights community and to show that China's communist leaders are now serious about taking action to improve human and civil rights.
Beating up attorneys and jailing them is not unusual police conduct in China. The AsianNews report notes that there has been an increase in intimidation and violence against the brave lawyers who defend human rights.
The plan says nothing about ending the monopoly of one-party rule in China. Instead, it muddles the concept of human and civil rights by speaking of subsistence rights and economic rights in a socialist state run by the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn’t discuss the fundamental freedoms that the civilized world cherishes—freedom of speech, freedom to practice one’s religion, freedom from arbitrary arrest, independent courts, equal justice under the law, and so on.
Today, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration’s torture policy will proceed as a formal criminal investigation.
The procedural history of the case is somewhat complicated. On March 17, a Spanish human rights organization, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners (Asociación pro dignidad de los presos y presas de España), filed a criminal complaint asking the court to begin a criminal investigation into the role that six Bush administration lawyers played in the introduction of a torture regime at Guantánamo. The complaint cited Chapter III of Title XXIV of the Spanish Criminal Code, which addresses crimes against prisoners and protected persons during an armed conflict, which implements Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Named as targets were former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former chief of staff to the vice president David Addington, former general counsel of the Department of Defense William J. Haynes II, former Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, former assistant attorney general and current federal judge Jay Bybee and former deputy assistant attorney general and now professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley John Yoo.
Spanish lawyers close to the case tell me that under applicable Spanish law, the Obama administration has the power to bring the proceedings in Spain against former Bush administration officials to a standstill. “All it has to do is launch its own criminal investigation through the Justice Department,” said one lawyer working on the case, “that would immediately stop the case in Spain.”
Welcome! I am a lawyer in the Washington, DC area. I've been very involved in the field of human rights law and on this blog, I link to interesting articles that I come across.
Posts
