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General News    H3'ed 5/9/13

Peter Van Buren: If the Government Does It, It's "Legal"

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

 

Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way.  Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike.  That act has certainly gotten Washington's and the media's collective attention.  After all, could there be anything more extreme than striking against your own body to make a point?  Suicide by strike?  It's the ultimate statement of protest and despair.  Certainly, the strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts.  That, in a word, is extraordinary.  But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight?  Here's one thing: despite the promise he made on entering the Oval office, President Obama has obviously not made much of an effort to close the prison, which, as he said recently, "hurts us, in terms of our international standing... [and] is a recruitment tool for extremists."

If Congress has been thoroughly recalcitrant when it comes to closing Guantanamo, the president's idea of what shutting down that prison meant proved curious indeed.  His plan involved transferring many of the prisoners from Cuba, that crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002, to a super-max-style prison in Illinois ("Gitmo North").  That would mean, of course, transferring indefinite detention from the offshore world of extraordinary rendition, black sites, and torture directly into the heart of the American justice system.  Obama himself has indicated that at least 50 of the prisoners can, in his view, never be released or tried (in part because confessions were tortured out of some of them).  They would be kept in what he, in the past, politely termed "prolonged detention."

Here's a second thing the strikers undoubtedly wanted to highlight and it's even harder to take in: Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned.  All 86 have been cleared for release -- years late, often after brutal interrogation experiences sometimes involving torture.  The problem: there is nowhere to release them to, especially since the majority of them are Yemenis and President Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring any prisoner to Yemen.

Then there are the prisoners who may indeed have done something criminal in regard to the U.S., but had confessions tortured out of them which won't hold up in court.  They are among the ones who will never be brought to trial, but never cleared for release either.  In other words, indefinite detention, something anathema to the American justice system, will for the conceivable future be us.  The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling.  No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state. 

We know one thing: no one, not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, or other top officials involved in setting up such a global system of injustice, sweeping up the innocent with the guilty, and subjecting them to horrors without end (including now force-feeding) will ever be brought to justice in an American court, nor will anyone involved in the system of renditiontorture, or abuse.  In the Obama years, while indefinite detention remained a grim American reality, the government, as TomDispatch regular and former State Department officer Peter Van Buren himself experienced, honed other methods for punishing those it was unhappy with, especially whistleblowers of all sorts.

One of those methods might be called "indefinite suspension."  Instead of not being charged, you are charged repeatedly and dragged endlessly -- your life in a state of suspension -- through various bureaucratic judicial processes, the actual courts, and endless appeals thereof, so that even if sooner or later you come out the other side exonerated, you will still have been punished for your "crimes." Let Peter Van Buren explain this mockery of "justice." Tom

Homeland Insecurity 
Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man 
By Peter Van Buren

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichà ©d Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air marshal fired for an act of whistleblowing.  He has continued to fight over seven long years for what once would have passed as simple justice: getting his job back. His is an all-too-twenty-first-century story of the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to thwart whistleblowers.

First, the government retroactively classified a previously unclassified text message to justify firing MacLean. Then it invoked arcane civil service procedures, including an "interlocutory appeal" to thwart him and, in the process, enjoyed the approval of various courts and bureaucratic boards apparently willing to stamp as "legal" anything the government could make up in its own interest.

And yet here's the miracle at the heart of this tale: MacLean refused to quit, when ordinary mortals would have thrown in the towel.  Now, with a recent semi-victory, he may not only have given himself a shot at getting his old job back, but also create a precedent for future federal whistleblowers. In the post-9/11 world, people like Robert MacLean show us how deep the Washington rabbit hole really goes.

The Whistle Is Blown

MacLean joined the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) in 2001 after stints with the Air Force and the Border Patrol. In July 2003, all marshals received a briefing about a possible hijacking plot. Soon after, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), which oversees FAMS, sent an unencrypted, open-air text message to the cell phones of the marshals cancelling several months of missions for cost-cutting reasons. MacLean became concerned that cancelling missions during a hijacking alert might create a dangerous situation for the flying public. He complained to his supervisor and to the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, but each responded that nothing could be done.

It was then that he decided to blow the whistle, hoping that public pressure might force the TSA to reinstate the marshals' flights. So MacLean talked to a reporter, who broadcast a story criticizing the TSA's decision and, after 11 members of Congress joined in the criticism, it reversed itself. At this point, MacLean had not been identified as the source of the leak and so carried on with his job.

A year later, he appeared on TV in disguise, criticizing the TSA dress code and its special boarding policies, which he believed allowed marshals to be easily identified by other passengers. This time, the TSA recognized his voice and began an investigation that revealed he had also released the 2003 text message. He was fired in April 2006. Although the agency had not labeled that message as "sensitive security information" (SSI) when it was sent in 2003, in August 2006, months after MacLean's firing, it issued a retroactive order stating that the text's content was indeed SSI.

A Whistleblower's Catch-22

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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