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extraordinary rendition
Kilmar Abrego García and the Trump Torture Regime
In the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land).
Jul 14, 2025
I didn’t want to write this article.
In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.
So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I’ve studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I’d naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.
The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego García
This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country’s immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.
It didn’t matter that Abrego García was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer’s honesty by firing him.
Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States “without inspection” (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was 16-years-old and fleeing his home country where, “[b]eginning around 2006, gang members stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion,” according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. “He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided.”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition.
Abrego García lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego García did construction work to support the family, which included his wife’s two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The “evidence” in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)
After almost six months in detention, during which time his son was born, an immigration court granted Abrego García a “withholding of removal.” That meant he would be allowed to remain in the United States and could legally work here, because he was believed to face genuine danger were he to be deported to El Salvador. He was required to check in annually with ICE, which he did, most recently in early January 2025.
Things were going relatively well. He had become a union member and was employed full time as a first-year sheet metal apprentice on a trajectory toward a rewarding career in the building trades. On March 12, 2025, however, everything changed. He was driving home from his jobsite after picking up his son (who is deaf in one ear, has intellectual disabilities, and does not speak) when ICE officers pulled his car over and arrested him. Officers gave his wife just 10 minutes to arrive and get their child, threatening to turn him over to Child Protective Services if she missed that deadline.
After being shuttled from state to state, Abrego García ended up at a Louisiana detention center, from which he was indeed deported to El Salvador along with several other men late on the evening of March 15. The people detaining him kept saying he would have a chance to speak to a judge about his legal status, but that was a blatant lie. As his court filing recounts:
He repeatedly requested judicial review. Officials consistently responded with false assurances that he would see a judge, deliberately misleading Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to prevent him from taking actions to assert his legal rights. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia only realized the true nature of his dire situation upon arrival at the airport in El Salvador, at which point it was too late to challenge the unlawful deportation.
Meanwhile, his wife had been desperately trying to find him by checking ICE’s online Detainee Locator System and calling detention centers around the country. Days after he’d already been shipped to El Salvador, the Locator System continued to say that he was at the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa, Texas.
In fact, Kilmar Abrego García had been disappeared. His wife might never have found him if it weren’t for a photo someone sent her from an article about more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants dispatched to CECOT in El Salvador at the same time. His face wasn’t visible, but she recognized him from two scars on his shaved head and some of his personal (but not gang-related) tattoos. She was well aware of CECOT’s reputation as a brutal mega-prison, a site of organized physical and psychological torture.
Once she knew where her husband was, efforts to get him back began. In April, a federal district judge ordered his return, a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court (which has in these months rarely sided against U.S. President Donald Trump). But the government dragged its feet, refusing to abide by either court’s ruling. Eventually, after maintaining for months that Abrego García was beyond its reach, the Department of Justice reversed itself and brought him back to the United States to face charges of human smuggling in Tennessee, where he remains in federal prison today. Those charges, based on a 2016 Tennessee traffic stop, appear flimsy at best.
Echoes of the “War on Terror”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition. That U.S. government practice of shipping detainees to torture sites around the world was a feature of the “Global War on Terror” (declared by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks). As early as 2002, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman quoted a U.S. official in Afghanistan, who told them: “We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them.”
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2011:
Detainees were… unlawfully rendered [transferred] to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.... Evidence suggests that torture in such cases was not a regrettable consequence of rendition; it may have been the purpose.
Abrego García was unlawfully rendered to El Salvador where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings, and psychological torture. Specifically,
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination. In the unlikely event that, in the future, district federal courts and then the Supreme Court prohibit the Trump administration from shipping detainees off to countries with well-known torture risks, its officials are likely to resort to paying off other, non-torturing nations to serve as trans-shipment sites.
Not the Only Victim
Kilmar Abrego García may turn out to be the most fortunate of the hundreds of migrants shipped from the U.S. to El Salvador in March. An intervention by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen pried him out of CECOT and got him transferred to a different Salvadoran prison. (It’s unclear why the Trump administration finally decided to bring him back to the United States.) Although he remains in federal custody, at least for the moment, he isn’t languishing incommunicado in El Salvador.
The 238 Venezuelan detainees sent to CECOT at the same time haven’t been that lucky. Like Abrego García, they were labeled terrorists and deported without benefit of due process. Trump and his aides called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.” But as the investigative journalism organization ProPublica revealed, the administration knew all along that those allegations were false. As the data they reviewed indicates:
The government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping, and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
Yet it seems likely that, without any judicial proceedings whatsoever, those men have received life sentences in a Salvadoran hellhole for the crime of seeking a better life in the United States.
It Could Happen to You
Most of the discussion in the press and in legal and philosophical circles about the U.S. use of torture during the war on terror assumed the legitimacy of torture’s main pretext: the need to extract lifesaving information from unwilling detainees. At the time, some arguments against it focused on torture’s efficacy: did torturing people truly produce “actionable intelligence”? Others took that effectiveness for granted, while questioning its ethics: Could the torture of a few be justified to save the many? The apotheosis of that false conundrum was the “ticking time bomb” problem.
I say “false conundrum” because such gathering of information is almost always a pretext for a program of institutionalized state torture. Its real political purpose is to maintain the power of the torturing regime by generating fear in anyone who might oppose it. This has been proven repeatedly in studies of torture regimes from Latin America to the Philippines and was no less true, in an oblique way, for the well-documented U.S. torture program of those “war on terror” years.
Anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times.
Most torture regimes directly target members of their own societies, hoping to frighten them into compliance through the knowledge that opponents of the regime are being tortured and that they could be next. The Bush-Cheney administration, however, used torture more indirectly to remind Americans that they were in mortal danger from the country’s enemies and that only the administration could protect them from that. The proof of that danger was the very fact that a self-evidently good government nonetheless was forced to commit such terrible acts at CIA “black sites” globally and elsewhere.
Today, in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.
But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”
Building Solidarity
Institutionalized state torture destroys social solidarity by sowing distrust. Writing about Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, Lawrence Weschler described how that government assigned every citizen a letter “grade” of A, B, or C. A’s were deemed good citizens and eligible for state employment; B’s were suspect and eligible only for private employment; C’s lost all their rights and posed a danger to anyone who hired or associated with them. “And,” wrote Weschler, “the point was that anyone at any time could suddenly find himself reclassified as a ‘C’—because, after all, they knew everything.” (And how much more do “they” know about us today, now that federal data about each one of us is rapidly being centralized and consolidated?)
One effect of Uruguay’s torture regime was a profound social isolation. As one respondent told Weschler:
Fear exterminated all social life in the public realm. Nobody spoke in the streets for fear of being heard… One tried not to make new friends, for fear of being held responsible for their unknown pasts. One suspected immediately those who were more open or less afraid, of being “agents provocateurs” of the intelligence services. Rumors about torture, arrests, mistreatments were so magnified by our terror as to take on epic proportions.
Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity. I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come.
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The Supreme Court Just Granted Trump a License to Erase Moral Responsibility
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Jun 26, 2025
The American people just got a taste of authoritarianism wrapped in judicial robes. In a stunning 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court green-lit the mass deportation of immigrants, not to their home countries but to third nations where they have no legal status, no family, and often no hope.
In her dissent, Justice Sonja Sotomayor, calling the shadow docket ruling “inexcusable,” pointed out how destructive this is to the rule of law (both U.S. and international law largely prohibit this) and to the lives of the people who may be deported without due process:
The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks.
The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.” By rewarding lawlessness, the court once again undermines that foundational principle.
In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.
This ruling by six corrupt Republican justices allows Donald Trump or any future president to designate any country they choose as a “safe third country” and deport people there without meaningful review, even if they’ve committed no crime and have a valid asylum claim.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It echoes one of the most cold-blooded decisions made by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime: to locate their extermination camps not within Germany, but in the foreign lands of occupied Poland.
Let’s be clear: Deportation is not genocide. But both decisions—then and now—are grounded in the same logic of moral evasion through geographic displacement.
When regimes want to commit acts that would stir conscience or provoke backlash at home, they find ways to outsource the cruelty.
The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazi leadership understood that while Germany’s public had been bombarded with antisemitic propaganda for years, they still might balk at the wholesale slaughter of millions of people inside German borders. So they built Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec far away, deep in Poland, where there were no German newspapers, no prying eyes, and no courts to second-guess their machinery of death.
As Raul Hilberg and other Holocaust historians have documented, Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich made this decision deliberately to preserve the illusion of “moral cleanliness” at home while carrying out genocide abroad.
Today’s Trump version of this practice is more sanitized, but no less cynical.
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries—often places they’ve never even set foot in—the Supreme Court has granted the executive branch a license to erase moral responsibility.
As long as the suffering happens somewhere else, we’re told, it’s not our fault. It’s not our soil. Not our responsibility.
That kind of logic is the death of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As Federal Judge Patricia Millett said of Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador, compared with FDR’s actions in WWII, “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
The Trump administration argued—and the court’s on-the-take, Republican-appointed majority agreed—that migrants have no right to American judicial processes once they’re transferred elsewhere. In other words, we can dodge our legal obligations under both U.S. and international law simply by putting someone on a plane.
This is the same loophole thinking that allowed George W. Bush’s administration to kidnap terror suspects and ship them to places like Egypt and Syria, where they were tortured out of view. That policy was called “extraordinary rendition.” Today, we might call this new policy extraordinary rejection: a way to deny asylum without confronting its human cost.
And here’s the truly chilling part: Once someone has been deported to a third country, they are functionally outside the U.S. legal system. They can’t sue. They can’t appeal. They may not even survive. And, to Trump’s delight, it’ll all be outside the reach of American courts and U.S. media.
This obscene policy isn’t about safety, it’s about displacement as punishment and the creation of a pseudo-legal infrastructure of indifference to the humanity of the people we’re “processing.”
Whether it’s a camp outside Kraków or a deportation center in Guatemala, the strategy is the same: create a zone of moral invisibility. A legal no-man’s-land where acts that would outrage decent people become routine, because they happen far away, beyond the reach of media, law, and conscience.
That’s not how democracies behave: That’s how authoritarian regimes insulate themselves from dissent.
And like all authoritarian tools, once it exists, it will be used again.
You may think this only affects immigrants. But consider: The legal precedent now exists for the government to forcibly remove someone from U.S. soil and drop them in another country without due process. Today it’s asylum-seekers. Tomorrow, who knows?
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
You think that’s paranoid? So did people in 1932 Berlin.
The genius of the American system—at least in theory—is that it puts checks on state power. The executive cannot act like a king. The courts must protect the vulnerable. And the public must have visibility into the actions done in our name.
This week, though, the Supreme Court abdicated that role. And in doing so, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazis did it. So did the Bush administration. Now Trump’s backers on the court have opened the door once more.
History doesn’t repeat, but, as Mark Twain said, it rhymes. And if we’re not careful, we may soon find that rhyme turning into a full verse we’ve heard before.
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Trump's Lawlessness Comes From Seeds Planted by Bush-Cheney
The federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump.
Apr 21, 2025
In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.
It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that “car salesman from Bavaria.”
El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was detained by the FBI at JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his release.
An “Administrative Error”
I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego García had fled that country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in 2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.
He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego García asylum, the judge assigned him a status — “withholding from removal” — which kept him safe in this country, because he faced the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.
Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They told him his status had been revoked (which wasn’t true) and promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country. Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere” with “some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.” Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego García fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.
The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an “administrative error” in deporting him but have so far refused to bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling demanding that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on April 12th finally acknowledged to the D.C. district court that he “is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” Its statement continued: “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” On April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it clear to reporters that Abrego García will not be returning to the United States.
Previously, the government’s spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis’s order: to identify what steps the administration is (or isn’t) taking to get him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its statement that Abrego García “is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador” suggests officials intend to argue that — despite paying the Salvadoran government a reported six million dollars for its prison services — the United States has no influence over Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive. The Trump administration’s truth-telling record is not exactly encouraging.The technical term for such detainee transfers is “extraordinary rendition.” “Rendition” involves sending a prisoner to another country to be interrogated, imprisoned, and even possibly tortured. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal legal strictures, as with the cases of el-Masri and Ahar decades ago,, and Abrego García today. Extraordinary rendition violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which explicitly prohibits sending someone to another country to be mistreated or tortured. It also violates U.S. anti-torture laws. As countless illegal Trump administration acts demonstrate, however, illegality is no longer a barrier of any sort to whatever its officials want to do.
Two other flights left for El Salvador on the day Abrego García was rendered. They contained almost 200 people accused of being members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and were similarly deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without any hearings. Are they actually gang members? No one knows, although it seems likely that at least some of them aren’t. Jerce Reyes Barrios, for example, was a Venezuelan soccer coach who sought asylum in the U.S. and whose tattoo, celebrating the famous Spanish soccer team Royal Madrid, was claimed to be evidence enough of his gang membership and the excuse for his deportation.
Andry José Hernández Romero is another unlikely gang member. He’s a gay makeup artist who entered the United States last August to keep a pre-arranged asylum appointment. Instead, he was arrested and held in detention until the Tren de Aragua flights in March. The proof of his gang membership? His “Tres Reyes” or “Three Kings” tattoos that were common in his hometown in Venezuela.
In fact, all 200 or so deportees on those flights have been illegally rendered to El Salvador in blatant defiance of a judge’s court order to stop them or return those already in the air. None of those men received any sort of due process before being shipped off to a Salvadoran hellhole. In response, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing-face emoji.
Even U.S. citizens are at risk of incarceration at CECOT. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Bukele, the State Department’s website praised his “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” an offer “to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Trump reiterated his interest in shipping “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador during his press conference with Bukele. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance has observed, “If it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us.”
It Didn’t Start with Trump
It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
As I wrote more than a decade ago, after September 11th, torture went “mainstream” in the United States. The Bush administration cultivated an understandable American fear of terrorism to justify abrogating what, until then, had been a settled consensus in this country: that torture is both wrong and illegal. In the face of a new enemy, al-Qaeda, the administration argued that the requirements for decent treatment of wartime detainees outlined in the Geneva Conventions had been rendered “quaint.” Apparently, wartime rights granted even to Nazi prisoners of war during World War II were too risky to extend to that new foe.
In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.
The very fact that they were willing to torture prisoners was proof that those people must deserve it — even though, as we now know, many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or the September 11th attacks. (And even if they had been involved, no one, not even a terrorist, deserves to be tortured.)
If you’re too young to remember (or have been lucky enough to forget), you can click here, or here, or here for the grisly details of what the war on terror did to its victims.
The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us.
Sadly, all too many of us became inured to the idea that prisoners could be sent to that infamous offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, perhaps never to be released. (Indeed, as of January 2025, of the hundreds of people incarcerated there over the years, 15 war on terror prisoners still remain.) It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the second time around, Donald Trump seized on Guantánamo as a possible place to house the immigrants he sought to deport from this country. After all, so many of us were already used to thinking of anybody sent there as the worst of the worst, as something other than human.
Dehumanizing the targets of institutionalized mistreatment and torture proved to be both the pretext for and a product of the process. Every torture regime develops a dehumanizing language for those it identifies as legitimate targets. For example, the torturers employed by the followers of Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s 1973 military coup, typically called their targets “humanoids” (to distinguish them from actual human beings).
For the same reason, the Israel Defense Forces now refer to just about anyone they kill in Gaza or on the West Bank as a “terrorist.” And the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist” was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.
Trump’s representatives have used the same kind of language to describe people they are sending to that prison in El Salvador. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, referred to them as “heinous monsters,” which is in keeping with Trump’s own description of his political opponents as inhuman “vermin.” At a rally in New Hampshire in 2023, Trump told the crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Here he was talking not only about immigrants, but about U.S. citizens as well.
After years of security theater, all too many Americans seem ready to accept Trump’s pledge to root out the vermin.
It Can Happen to You
One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.
Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now. Remember that El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is perfectly willing to receive U.S. citizens, too, as prisoners in his country. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, made that point in a statement that accompanied that court’s recent order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego García’s return to the United States. They wrote, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
As the justices remind us, it can happen here. It can happen to you.
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Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh Unfit for 9/11 Trial, Says Military Judge
"This decision by the military judge today does mark the first time that the United States has formally acknowledged the CIA torture program produced profound and prolonged psychological harm," said al-Shibh's lawyer.
Sep 22, 2023
A U.S. military judge on Thursday found Guantánamo Bay prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh—who stands accused of being a key 9/11 organizer—unfit to stand trial because he suffers from mental illness his attorney says was caused by CIA torture years ago.
Air Force Col. Matthew McCall severed al-Shibh, a 51-year-old Yemeni, from the conspiracy case involving four other defendants who allegedly organized the cell of militants in Hamburg, Germany who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and flew it into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Al-Shibh had been charged as an accomplice in the case.
"This decision by the military judge today does mark the first time that the United States has formally acknowledged that the CIA torture program produced profound and prolonged psychological harm," David Bruck, al-Shibh's lead defense attorney, told reporters at Guantánamo Bay on Thursday evening. "This is exactly what the CIA promised would not happen."
McCall's ruling—which does not directly attribute torture as the cause of al-Shibh's afflictions—came after a three-member military "sanity board" diagnosed the defendant with post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychotic features and persecutory delusional disorder. This, the board said, renders him "unable to understand the nature of the proceedings against him or cooperate intelligently in his defense."
According to Lawdragon editor-in-chief John Ryan:
Al-Shibh has long claimed that the detention facility guard force has subjected him to noises and vibrations, continuing his torture from CIA black sites... In recent years, his lawyers have also claimed that al-Shibh feels stabbing and other painful sensations that he experiences as directed invisibly at parts of his body. The government has denied the allegations.
"The totality of the facts demonstrates an accused who is wholly focused on his delusions," McCall wrote in his ruling, according to The New York Times. "Again and again, he focuses his counsel's work on stopping his delusional harassment, (which) demonstrates the impairment of his ability to assist in his defense."
Military prosecutor Clayton Trivett Jr. acknowledged that al-Shibh is delusional but insisted "he has the capacity to participate" in his defense, and that his refusal to do so is "really just a choice."
Citing al-Shibh's cooperation with his defense team, Trivett added that "this does not look like someone who is incompetent."
While McCall ordered pretrial proceedings to continue Friday for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the alleged mastermind of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11—as well as three co-defendants, what comes next for al-Shibh is unknown.
All five of the 9/11 defendants—Mohammed, his nephew Ammar al-Baluchi, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and al-Shibh—were captured in Pakistan in late 2002 and early 2003 before being turned over to the United States. Hassan bin Attash, who was captured with bin al-Shibh in Karachi, has testified that they were both sent via extraordinary rendition to the notorius "Salt Pit" outside Kabul, Afghanistan, where suspected militant Gul Rahman was tortured to death in November 2002.
Like Rahman, al-Shibh says he was shackled naked to a ceiling in a painful "stress position" for days on end. He was then reportedly sent to Jordan, where one witness told Human Rights Watch he was subjected to "electric shocks, long periods of sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, and being made to sit on sticks and bottles."
Al-Shibh told the International Committee of the Red Cross that he was kept naked and shackled to the ceiling for a week at a black site in Poland, where he was also deprived of solid food for three to four weeks.
According to the CIA's own documents:
The interrogation plan proposed that... al-Shibh would be subjected to "sensory dislocation." The proposed sensory dislocation included shaving al-Shibh's head and face, exposing him to loud noise in a white room with white lights, keeping him "unclothed and subjected to uncomfortably cool temperatures," and shackling him "hand and foot with arms outstretched over his head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with his arms)".
The CIA torture plan also included near-constant interrogations, slamming into walls, hard slaps to the face and abdomen, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, and the interrupted drowning torture known as waterboarding.
Al-Shibh was also held at a black site in Morocco for three-and-a-half months, where Moroccan agents allegedly tortured him under CIA supervision. Moroccan interrogators videotaped some of the interrogations and handed the footage over to the CIA.
This isn't the first time that torture played a role in derailing the prosecution of an alleged 9/11 plotter. In 2009, Susan J. Crawford, the top George W. Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantánamo prisoners to trial, declared that the U.S. "tortured" Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker, and declined to green light his prosecution.
Col. Stuart Crouch, a Guantánamo prosecutor whose Marine Corps buddy was a pilot on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, refused to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi—who allegedly helped organize the plane's hijacking—because he was tortured.
Additionally, numerous Guantánamo officials have resigned over what they claim is a corrupt military commission system. Former lead prosecutor Col. Morris Davis—who called trials there "rigged from the start"—stepped down in 2007, claiming he was told by top Bush lawyer Jim Haynes that acquittals were unacceptable.
"I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."
At least four other military prosecutors—Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, Capt. Carrie Wolf and Darrel J. Vandeval—requested to be removed from the military commissions because they also felt that the proceedings were unfair.
In 2021, seven out of eight members of the military jury convened to hear the case against Guantánamo detainee and alleged terrorist plotter Majid Khan recommended total clemency after the defendant testified how he endured torture including rape, being hung from a ceiling beam, and being waterboarded while he was held at a CIA black site in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, Ted Olson—the former Bush administration solicitor-general who then argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture—made a stunning admission, saying the military commissions don't work and should be shut down, and the government should strike plea deals with 9/11 defendants held at the prison.
"In retrospect, we made two mistakes in dealing with the detained individuals at Guantánamo," Olson wrote. "First, we created a new legal system out of whole cloth. I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."
Defense and prosecution attorneys had been negotiating a possible plea deal that would have spared the defendants the prospect of execution. However, earlier this month the White House said that President Joe Biden would not approve or deny such a request because he "was unsettled about accepting terms for the plea from those responsible for the deadliest assault on the United States since Pearl Harbor," according to The Associated Press.
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Unveiling Shadows: Guantánamo Prisoners and the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
This August 30, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Aug 30, 2023
Despite the fact that the United States has routinely and openly violated the human rights of its own citizens as well as communities across the globe, the government rarely has any qualms about condemning the violations of other countries. These condemnations, almost always hypocritical, however, often do more to shine light on its own abuses and the lack of accountability.
Like clockwork each year, the United States issues statements commemorating various human rights days highlighting particular abuses. Last year, for example, Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement through the State Department on the occasion of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The statement reads in part that “the United States renews its commitment to addressing enforced disappearance and calls on governments around the world to put an end to this practice, hold those responsible to account, reveal the whereabouts or fate of loved ones who have been disappeared, and respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons.”
This year, the U.S. government will almost certainly release yet another statement to commemorate the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30, once again erasing its own crimes. Although disappearances have less typically been associated with the United States, the U.S. has long deployed this abuse in the War on Terror—often disguising the practice through euphemisms and denials. After two decades plus of the War on Terror, however, it is imperative to shed light on the unresolved issue of Guantánamo prisoners’ disappearances and the CIA’s disturbing rendition, detention, and interrogation program that operated in the earlier days of the war.
Obscured Realities: Rendition and Disappearances
In the early days of the War on Terror, the CIA was given the licence to render and detain people in countries across the globe who were willing to host black sites. The program operated from 2002-2009, with at least 119 individuals enduring the violence of the CIA. Some never returned home; others were sent to Guantánamo Bay. Although the U.S. government has continued to use the term “render” as in render to justice, in practice, many of those subjected to this violence have effectively disappeared—leaving their families in an abyss of uncertainty, all while the U.S. government refuses to reckon with this legacy.
On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Enforced disappearances are a particularly brutal form of state violence. Not only do the victims fear never being found, the families of the victims live in perpetual uncertainty with constant denials of information from the government about their loved ones’ fates. The pain of not knowing whether a family member is alive or deceased, free or imprisoned, makes closure impossible.
Disappearing War on Terror Prisoners
The post-9/11 and the War on Terror waged by the United States transformed many parts of the world into war zones, cemeteries, and prisons. Lives were forever lost or shrouded in obscurity, while entire families were erased. Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen, is just one name among the countless individuals whose fate became tragically entwined with the secret operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, vanishing into CIA black sites, never to emerge alive. Among the torture Rahman endured was being handcuffed to the ground, put in a diaper, and placed in a cell with freezing temperatures—which lead to his untimely death by hypothermia. Rahman’s family was never formally informed of his death, and, despite their fighting to have his body returned for a proper burial, the United States has denied their request.
Detention by the CIA was not the only way War on Terror prisoners have been effectively disappeared. When the first Muslim men were taken to Guantánamo in January 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. Not only because the U.S. didn’t actually know the identities of many of the men, but because they were so dehumanized, that the U.S. government didn’t prioritize sharing the names with the International Committee of the Red Cross or any other agency or institution—especially any that would hold them accountable. It wasn’t until 2004 that the names of the men detained were finally revealed—although many with incomplete names documented, leaving their families in prolonged darkness about their whereabouts. Names were only disclosed by monitoring websites like Alasra and the Britain-based CagePrisoners.
Guantánamo became synonymous with secrecy, human rights abuses, and the plight of countless detainees. Many were held there for years, unaccounted for, like ghosts in the system. Families were left in a perpetual state of uncertainty, not knowing whether their loved ones were dead or alive. In addition, nine prisoners died while at Guantánamo—a harrowing and violent conclusion to their detention—especially since the deaths occurred years after many of the men last saw their families.
As a Guantánamo survivor myself, I spent around six agonizing years at Guantánamo before my family knew anything about my whereabouts. Another family came to know about their son in 2016; a lawyer contacted the family and let them know.
Continuing Injustice: Recent Cases
The injustices extended beyond the walls of Guantánamo. In many cases, after being transferred, detainees vanished for months, disappearing into solitary confinement in their home countries in Saudi Arabia or in third-party nations like the United Arab Emirates. Constituting a violent ebb and flow of being lost and found, War on Terror prisoners have been forced to endure the possibility of being disappeared again and again.
Ghassan al-Sharbi’s case represents a more recent chapter in this ongoing tragedy. Forcibly repatriated to Saudi Arabia, he vanished into obscurity. Despite attempts to locate him, his whereabouts remain unknown. The lack of response from both the Saudi government and the State Department exemplifies the prevailing indifference to the plight of former detainees.
Another former prisoner, Asim al-khalaqi, was released to Kazakhstan in 2015, but died tragically four months later due to mistreatment and medical negligence. The Kazakh government failed to inform Asim’s family of his death, denying them the chance to retrieve his body or hold a proper burial—thus constituting a symbolic disappearance. He was buried in an unknown cemetery and an unknown grave.
In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable.
The stories of Gul Rahman, Asim al-khalaqi, Ghassan al-Sharbi, and countless others stand as painful reminders of the enduring impact of CIA rendition, Guantánamo Bay, and the “War on Terror.” While the black sites and detention camps have garnered international criticism, their legacy continues to cast a long shadow over the lives of those affected. Families have been denied closure, and the cycle of suffering perpetuates even after release. The world must remember these names, demand accountability, and work toward a future where such gross violations of human rights are truly left in the past. Until then, the War on Terror will endure as a haunting testament to the cost of sacrificing justice for security.
On this international day, let us demand an end to enforced disappearances and the practices that perpetuate them. Let us hold nations accountable for their actions and demand transparency. In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable. By doing so, we honor the disappeared, restore justice, and ensure that no one is condemned to obscurity or denied their humanity.
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'All of These Guys Belong in Prison': CIA Torture Described in Vivid Detail by Psychologist
James Mitchell, one of a pair of psychologists paid $81 million to oversee the CIA's interrogation of suspected terrorists, said detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri "liked" being in a box used to torture him.
May 04, 2022
One of the psychologists paid tens of millions of dollars by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to oversee the interrogation of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror provided new details on Monday about the torture of a Guantanamo Bay detainee at CIA "black site" in Thailand.
"Imagine the hell Mr. Nashiri experienced outside of that box that made him prefer being inside it."
The New York Times reports James E. Mitchell told a military judge during a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri--a Saudi national facing possible execution for allegedly masterminding the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen--broke quickly under torture and became so obedient that he would crawl into a cramped confinement box before guards ordered him to do so.
Initially, guards had to force al-Nashiri into the box. But according to Mitchell, the prisoner "liked being in the box" and would "get in and close it himself."
Annie W. Morgan, a former Air Force defense attorney who is a member of al-Nashiri's legal team, told the Times that when she heard Mitchell's testimony, "I got the image of crate-training a dog and became nauseous."
"That was the goal of the program, to create a sense of learned helplessness and to become completely dependent upon and submissive to his captors," she added, referencing a tactic taught in U.S. torture programs and documents dating back to the 1950s.
Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst who advocates Guantanamo's closure, tweeted, "Imagine the hell Mr. Nashiri experienced outside of that box that made him prefer being inside it."
Al-Nashiri's attorneys--who argue that evidence in the case is tainted by torture--questioned Mitchell about what happened at the Thailand black site in November 2002, when former CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw the secret prison.
The psychologist's testimony is meant to shed light on abuse that may have been recorded on scores of videotapes documenting detainee torture that were later destroyed at the behest of then-CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez, who claimed in his memoir that Haspel drafted the 2005 cable ordering the move.
Mitchell--who along with fellow psychologist John "Bruce" Jessen was paid $81 million by the CIA to develop and supervise an interrogation regimen for terrorism suspects--described how the diminutive al-Nashiri was so scrawny that guards stopped subjecting him to the interrupted drowning torture commonly called waterboarding for fear the prisoner might be seriously hurt.
In addition to waterboarding and other approved torture techniques, a declassified 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report revealed how interrogators threatened to sexually assault al-Nashiri's mother, and how he was terrorized with a power drill and raped with a garden hose in a practice known as rectal hydration that was administered to Guantanamo prisoners who refused to eat or drink.
Mitchell told the court that:
- One interrogator used a belt to strap al-Nashiri's arms behind his back and lift him up from behind to his tiptoes. Mitchell said he objected after the prisoner howled in pain, fearing his shoulders would be dislocated. The torture continued.
- Guards forced the shackled prisoner onto his knees then bent him backward, with a broomstick placed behind his knees.
- In a bid to train al-Nashiri to call him "sir," the chief interrogator gave him a cold bath before scraping a stiff-bristled brush from his anus to his face and mouth.
The Times previously reported:
Interrogators continually told Mr. Nashiri they did not believe he was telling everything he knew, threatening him with worse treatment if he did not tell them more. The prisoner, already subjected to the whole array of C.I.A. torture techniques--loud noise, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, wall-slamming, and waterboarding--insisted he was trying to remember and tell them everything.
But the interrogators appear to have ultimately concluded that Mr. Nashiri was not lying. Some of the cables back to headquarters, apparently written by Ms. Haspel, described him as "compliant and cooperative," according to the 2014 report on the interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In addition to the black site in Thailand, al-Nashiri--who was captured in Dubai in October 2002--was imprisoned at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and possibly Morocco before being sent to Guantanamo in September 2006.
In 2010 he was granted victim status by the Polish government, whose cooperation with and complicity in the George W. Bush administration's extraordinary rendition and torture program was later revealed and investigated.
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'Disgraceful': Supreme Court Sides With Hiding CIA Torture
In March, human rights advocates condemned the U.S. Supreme Court's decision allowing the Biden administration to block Mitchell and Jessen from cooperating with Polish prosecutors investigating the torture of Saudi terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.
The Bush administration officials who devised, approved, and implemented the post-9/11 torture regimen have enjoyed total impunity. Not only did Bush's successor, former President Barack Obama, break a campaign promise to investigate and prosecute abuses as required by U.S. and international law, his Justice Department actively shielded them from accountability as torture continued at Guantanamo.
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Declassified Docs Show CIA Used Prisoner as a Torture Training Prop
"Twenty years later, none of the those responsible for the CIA's heinous regime of torture were ever prosecuted," lamented Rep. Ilhan Omar. "Instead they got promotions."
Mar 16, 2022
A prisoner at a Central Intelligence Agency "black site" in Afghanistan was used as a training prop to teach U.S. operatives how to torture other prisoners, leaving him with serious brain damage and other ailments, newly declassified documents published this week affirmed.
"We now know that the CIA's brutalization of Ammar at the black sites was secretly condemned by the agency itself."
Ammar al-Baluchi, a 44-year-old Kuwaiti national, is currently imprisoned at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is one of five men awaiting trial by military commission for alleged involvement in plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The case, which has been delayed due to disputes over the admissibility of defendant testimony extracted through torture, has been in pre-trial hearings for more than a decade.
A subject of the U.S. government's extraordinary rendition program, al-Baluchi was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and then transferred to secret CIA prison known both as Cobalt and the Salt Pit north of Kabul, Afghanistan. The so-called black site gained international attention after revelations that prisoner Gul Rahman was tortured to death there in 2002, and that instead of being punished, the CIA officer in charge of the site was subsequently promoted.
"Twenty years later, none of the those responsible for the CIA's heinous regime of torture were ever prosecuted," U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted Tuesday in response to a Guardian report on al-Baluchi's experience. "Instead they got promotions."
According to a declassified 2008 report by the CIA inspector general's office, agency officials knew that al-Baluchi no longer posed a terror threat but rendered him to the Salt Pit, where he was subjected to techniques that were approved under the George W. Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" regimen, as well as unauthorized torture.
Not only was al-Baluchi was subjected to the authorized torture of "walling"--in which naked prisoners were slammed against plywood and, in departures from the approved method, concrete walls--he was also used a training prop to teach trainee interrogators how to perform the technique.
"They smashed my head against the wall repeatedly. It continued until I lost count at each session. As my head was being hit each time I would see sparks of lights in my eyes."
According to the declassified report, "all the interrogation students lined up to 'wall' Ammar so that [the instructor] could certify them on their ability to use the technique."
The torture training sessions "typically... did not last for more than two hours at a time," the document states.
"They smashed my head against the wall repeatedly. It continued until I lost count at each session," al-Baluchi recounted. "As my head was being hit each time I would see sparks of lights in my eyes. As the intensity of the sparks were increasing as a result of repeated hitting, all of a sudden I felt a strong jolt of electricity in my head then I couldn't see anything and everything went dark and I passed out."
Previously declassified documents state that James Mitchell--who along with his associate John "Bruce" Jessen was paid $81 million by the CIA to oversee the torture and interrogation of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror--told one of al-Baluchi's lawyers that it "looks like they used your client as a training prop."
In 2018, al-Baluchi underwent an MRI examination which found "abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage" which "were consistent with traumatic brain injury."
According to a neuropsychologist's evaluation, al-Baluchi also suffers from anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The inspector general's report notes that al-Baluchi's torture did not produce any useful intelligence and that he "fabricated the information he provided" in an effort to end his torment.
The document also paints al-Baluchi in a sympathetic light, referring to him as "one of the more cooperative, likable, even 'gentle' detainees," and as "one of the more intelligent or 'bookish'" prisoners. Some interrogators expressed remorse for their actions, with one saying "there is no honor in it" and another stating that he "wished he had never been asked" to participate in torture.
Al-Baluchi was subsequently transferred to numerous other black sites, including one in Vilnius, Lithuania where he was tortured by the notorious CIA operative known as "The Preacher" due to his penchant for infusing interrogation sessions with religious fervor. In 2006 al-Baluchi was transferred to Guantanamo.
The inspector general's report concludes the CIA's rationale for detaining al-Baluchi was "fuzzy and circular."
"We now know that the CIA's brutalization of Ammar at the black sites was secretly condemned by the agency itself," Alka Pradhan, one of al-Baluchi's military commission attorneys, told Forever Wars' Spencer Ackerman. "But it didn't stop the U.S. government from holding him in a CIA facility at Guantanamo, and trying to execute him using evidence derived from that very same treatment."
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that U.S. military prosecutors are engaged in talks with lawyers for five Guantanamo defendants including al-Baluchi and his uncle, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to possibly negotiate plea deals that will spare the men from execution but result in their lifetime imprisonment.
The issue of torture has proved an impediment to the prosecution of terrorism suspects, and may at least partially explain prosecutors' newfound willingness to negotiate plea agreements.
Last November, seven out of eight members of a military jury convened to hear the case against Guantanamo detainee Majid Khan recommended clemency after the defendant testified how he endured torture including rape, being hung from a ceiling beam, and being subjected to the interrupted drowning method known as waterboarding.
The jurors called Khan's treatment "an affront to... the concept of justice" and "a stain on the moral fiber of America."
Numerous Guantanamo prosecutors have also resigned their posts in protest, with former lead prosecutor Col. Morris Davis condemning what he called "rigged" military commissions designed to ensure that every defendant is convicted.
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Diego Garcia: The "Unsinkable Carrier" Springs a Leak
A court ruling against colonial exploitation could threaten a strategic U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean. Indigenous advocates say it’s about time.
Apr 14, 2019
The recent decision by the Hague-based International Court of Justice that the Chagos Islands -- with its huge U.S. military base at Diego Garcia -- are being illegally occupied by the United Kingdom (UK) has the potential to upend the strategic plans of a dozen regional capitals, ranging from Beijing to Riyadh.
For a tiny speck of land measuring only 38 miles in length, Diego Garcia casts a long shadow. Sometimes called Washington's "unsinkable aircraft carrier," planes and warships based on the island played an essential role in the first and second Gulf wars, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Libya. Its strategic location between Africa and Indonesia and 1,000 miles south of India gives the U.S. access to the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the vast Indian Ocean. No oil tanker, no warship, no aircraft can move without its knowledge.
Most Americans have never heard of Diego Garcia for a good reason: No journalist has been allowed there for more than 30 years, and the Pentagon keeps the base wrapped in a cocoon of national security. Indeed, the UK leased the base to the Americans in 1966 without informing either the British Parliament or the U.S. Congress.
The February 25 Court decision has put a dent in all that by deciding that Great Britain violated United Nations Resolution 1514 prohibiting the division of colonies before independence. The UK broke the Chagos Islands off from Mauritius, a former colony on the southeast coast of Africa that Britain decolonized in 1968. At the time, Mauritius objected, reluctantly agreeing only after Britain threatened to withdraw its offer of independence.
The Court ruled 13-1 that the UK had engaged in a "wrongful act" and must decolonize the Chagos "as rapidly as possible."
"The Great Game" in the Indian Ocean
While the ruling is only "advisory," it comes at a time when the U.S. and its allies are confronting or sanctioning countries for supposedly illegal occupations -- Russia in the Crimea and China in the South China Sea.
The suit was brought by Mauritius and some of the 1,500 Chagos islanders who were forcibly removed from the archipelago in 1973. The Americans, calling it "sanitizing" the islands, moved the Chagossians more than 1,000 miles to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they've languished in poverty ever since.
Diego Garcia is the lynchpin for U.S. strategy in the region. With its enormous runways, it can handle B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and huge C-5M, C-17, and C-130 military cargo planes. The lagoon has been transformed into a naval harbor that can handle an aircraft carrier. The U.S. has built a city -- replete with fast food outlets, bars, golf courses and bowling alleys -- that hosts some 3,000 to 5,000 military personnel and civilian contractors.
What you can't find are any native Chagossians.
The Indian Ocean has become a major theater of competition between India, the U.S., and Japan on one side, and the growing presence of China on the other. Tensions have flared between India and China over the Maldives and Sri Lanka, specifically China's efforts to use ports on those island nations. India recently joined with Japan and the U.S. in a war game -- Malabar 18 -- that modeled shutting down the strategic Malacca Straits between Sumatra and Malaysia, through which some 80 percent of China's energy supplies pass each year.
A portion of the exercise involved anti-submarine warfare aimed at detecting Chinese submarines moving from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean. To Beijing, those submarines are essential for protecting the ring of Chinese-friendly ports that run from southern China to Port Sudan on the east coast of Africa. Much of China's oil and gas supplies are vulnerable, because they transit the narrow Mandeb Strait that guards the entrance to the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz that oversees access to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The U.S. 5th Fleet controls both straits.
Tensions in the region have increased since the Trump administration shifted the focus of U.S. national security from terrorism to "major power competition" -- that is, China and Russia. The U.S. accuses China of muscling its way into the Indian Ocean by taking over ports, like Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Gwadar in Pakistan that are capable of hosting Chinese warships.
India, which has its own issues with China dating back to their 1962 border war, is ramping up its anti-submarine forces and building up its deep-water navy. New Delhi also recently added a long-range Agni-V missile that's designed to strike deep into China, and the right-wing government of Narendra Modi is increasingly chummy with the American military. The Americans even changed their regional military organization from "Pacific Command" to "Indo-Pacific Command" in deference to New Delhi.
The term for these Chinese friendly ports --"string of pearls" -- was coined by Pentagon contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and, as such, should be taken with a grain of salt. China is indeed trying to secure its energy supplies and also sees the ports as part of its worldwide Road and Belt Initiative trade strategy. But assuming the "pearls" have a military role, akin to 19th century colonial coaling stations, is a stretch. Most the ports would be indefensible if a war broke out.
An "Historic" Decision
Diego Garcia is central to the U.S. war in Somalia, its air attacks in Iraq and Syria, and its control of the Persian Gulf, and would be essential in any conflict with Iran. If the current hostility by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. toward Iran actually translates into war, the island will quite literally be an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
Given the strategic centrality of Diego Garcia, it's hard to imagine the US giving it up -- or rather, the British withdrawing their agreement with Washington and de-colonizing the Chagos Islands. In 2016, London extended the Americans' lease for 20 years.
Mauritius wants the Chagos back, but at this point doesn't object to the base. It certainly wants a bigger rent check and the right eventually to take the island group back.
It also wants more control over what goes on at Diego Garcia. For instance, the British government admitted that the Americans were using the island to transit "extraordinary renditions," people seized during the Afghan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2003, many of whom were tortured. Torture is a violation of international law.
As for the Chagossians, they want to go back.
Diego Garcia is immensely important for U.S. military and intelligence operations in the region, but it's just one of some 800 American military bases on every continent except Antarctica. Those bases form a worldwide network that allows the U.S. military to deploy advisors and Special Forces in some 177 countries across the globe. Those forces create tensions that can turn dangerous at a moment's notice.
For instance, there are currently U.S. military personal in virtually every country surrounding Russia: Norway, Poland, Hungary, Kosovo, Romania, Turkey, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. Added to that is the Mediterranean's 6th Fleet, which regularly sends warships into the Black Sea.
Much the same can be said for China. U.S. military forces are deployed in South Korea, Japan, and Australia, plus numerous islands in the Pacific. The American 7th fleet, based in Hawaii and Yokohama, is the Navy's largest.
In late March, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships transited the Taiwan Straits, which, while international waters, the Chinese consider an unnecessary provocation. British ships have also sailed close to Chinese-occupied reefs and islands in the South China Sea.
The fight to de-colonize the Chagos Islands will now move to the UN General Assembly. In the end, Britain may ignore the General Assembly and the Court, but it will be hard pressed to make a credible case for doing so. How Great Britain can argue for international law in the Crimea and South China Sea, while ignoring the International Court of Justice on the Chagos, will require some fancy footwork.
In the meantime, Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth calls the Court decision "historic," and one that will eventually allow the 6,000 native Chagossians and their descendants "to return home."
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The Hidden Structure of U.S. Empire
This irresponsible empire has squandered the resources of our own and other nations and spawned existential dangers that threaten the whole world, from nuclear war to environmental crisis.
Jan 02, 2019
My father was a doctor in the British Royal Navy, and I grew up traveling by troop-ship between the last outposts of the British Empire - Trincomalee, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, Aden, Singapore - and living in and around naval dockyards in England and Scotland.
The British naval bases where I grew up and the fading empire they supported are now part of history. Chatham Dockyard. a working dockyard for over 400 years, is now a museum and tourist attraction. Trincomalee Dockyard, where I was born, has been in the news as a site where the Sri Lankan Navy is accused of torturing and disappearing Tamil prisoners during the Sri Lankan civil war.
Since the late 1970s, I have lived in California and Florida, grappling with the contradictions of U.S. empire like other Americans. The U.S. does not have an internationally recognized territorial empire like the British or Ottoman Empires. American politicians routinely deny that the United States maintains or seeks an empire at all, even as they insist that its interests extend across the entire world, and as its policies impact the lives - and threaten the future - of people everywhere.
So how are we to understand this phenomenon of U.S. empire, which is so central to all our lives and our future, and yet whose structure remains hidden and covert?So how are we to understand this phenomenon of U.S. empire, which is so central to all our lives and our future, and yet whose structure remains hidden and covert?
In Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, co-edited by Carol McGranahan of the University of Colorado and John F. Collins of CUNY, twenty-four anthropologists studied groups of people whose lives are shaped by the U.S. empire and their interactions with it. Their subjects ranged from indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Hawaii to call center workers in the Philippines to the forcibly exiled people of Diego Garcia.
Many of the ethnographies highlighted the seeming contradiction of an actually existing global empire in a post-colonial world where nearly all countries are internationally recognized as independent and sovereign.
Stratified Sovereignty
The final entry in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire arrived at the most comprehensive analysis of the stratified and complex patterns of sovereignty through which formally independent states and their citizens nonetheless fall under the overarching sovereignty of the U.S. empire.
This chapter, "From Exception to Empire: Sovereignty, Carceral Circulation and the Global War on Terror," by Darryl Li, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, follows a group of men who came to Bosnia Hercegovina from mostly Arab countries to fight on the Bosnian Muslim side in the U.S.-backed proxy war to break up Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
By 2001, most of these 660 men had made new homes in Bosnia. Many had married Bosnian women and had Bosnian families. All had been granted Bosnian citizenship in recognition of their role in their adopted country's independence. But after the crimes of September 11th 2001, the U.S. government saw these former mujahideen as inherently dangerous, and insisted that they must be "denaturalized" and "repatriated."
At first, this was done through an extrajudicial process of "rendition," but after 2005 it was institutionalized in a nine-member State Commission (which included a U.S. Army officer and a British immigration official) to strip people of Bosnian citizenship; a "Reception Center for Irregular Migrants," a prison built at European Union expense on the edge of a refugee camp for Bosnian Serbs in Lukavica on the outskirts of Sarajevo; and a "Service for Foreigners' Affairs" under Bosnia's Ministry of Security, organized, trained and equipped by U.S. advisers at U.S. taxpayer expense, to run the prison and conduct deportations.
Darryl Li visited, studied and stayed in contact with some of these men and their Bosnian families for several years. He observed how, while the U.S. exercised supreme sovereignty over these men and their fate, the U.S. role was carefully hidden behind and operated through the formal sovereignty of Bosnia Hercegovina; and also how the fates of groups of men of different nationalities were governed by U.S. imperial relations with the various countries they came from and to where they could be "repatriated."
Most Egyptian men were sent back to Egypt, a reliable U.S. ally, where they were imprisoned, tortured and, in many cases, disappeared, according to their Bosnian families. By contrast, six men from Algeria were rendered to the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They were imprisoned there until they won a landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed them to sue for habeas corpus in U.S. courts. They were finally released in 2009, 2010 and 2013.
A Syrian-Bosnian man named Abu Hamza became the de facto leader of resistance to these denaturalizations and deportations. He was imprisoned for 7-1/2 years at the Lukavica prison, during most of which time the U.S. and its allies fought a bloody but failed proxy war to install a more subservient regime in his country of origin. He was finally released in 2016 to rejoin his Bosnian family.
When Darryl Li first visited Abu Hamza at the prison in Lukavica in 2009, he was dressed in an orange jalabiyya and baseball cap, on which he had stenciled the word "BOSNATANAMO." He had made this uniform for himself to highlight the parallels between the plight of prisoners at Lukavica and Guantanamo.
The flags flying over the guard gate of the prison in Lukavica were those of Bosnia and the European Union, and the U.S. was officially involved in the imprisonment of the men there only through diplomatic channels, generous funding and the assistance of American trainers and advisers. And yet the U.S. empire was the thinly veiled power behind the very existence of the prison and all that happened there.
Darryl Li compared the fates of the men in Bosnia with other cases of post-9/11 U.S. detention, and found a similar pattern throughout the U.S. gulag, in which the fates of people from specific countries were largely determined by the nature of U.S. imperial relations with the countries involved.
Darryl Li's research revealed an international system of stratified sovereignty, in which people's lives were subject to the overarching imperial sovereignty of the U.S. empire as well as to the nominally independent sovereignty of their own countries.For example, four British men detained in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo were among the first prisoners to be released and repatriated, and returned home to relatively normal lives in the U.K. By contrast, Li met a Palestinian man in Gaza in 2007 who was "repatriated" there despite never having lived there before. He was born in Jordan and grew up in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he was arrested and handed over to U.S. forces. After several years in U.S. military and CIA prisons, mostly in Afghanistan, he was sent back to Jordan, handed over to Israel and banished to Gaza.
In all these cases, Li observed how the U.S. empire maintained a systematic and overarching sovereignty over the people and countries involved, not by completely ignoring the sovereignty of Bosnia, Egypt, the U.K and other countries, but by selectively and opportunistically exercising its own power through their nominally independent political and legal systems and the particulars of its relations with each of them.
Darryl Li's research revealed an international system of stratified sovereignty, in which people's lives were subject to the overarching imperial sovereignty of the U.S. empire as well as to the nominally independent sovereignty of their own countries.
Empire, not exception.
The U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo in Cuba is widely viewed as a glaring exception to U.S. and international rules of law. Darryl Li noted that the prisoners are not the only non-Americans and non-Cubans living at Guantanamo, which also has a civilian staff of janitors, cooks and other workers, mostly from Jamaica and the Philippines. Like the prisoners and their American guards, these workers also live under the overarching sovereignty of the U.S. Empire.
"Both third-country national prisoners and workers at GTMO share the predicament of dwelling in a space between the juridical protections of their governments, the local state and the U.S. hegemon," Li observed.
Darryl Li concluded that this framework of stratified sovereignty, in which people live under the sovereignty of both their own country and that of the U.S. empire, is not an exception, but a norm of life in the U.S. empire. The shared predicament of workers and prisoners at Guantanamo is a striking example of how the U.S. empire works, not an exception to it.
Other seemingly exceptional cases can also be better understood as examples of this actually existing imperial system of stratified sovereignty.
Julian Assange's precarious asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London is a case in point. In Julian's case, U.S. imperial power has worked through a network of four nominally independent but subordinate states - Australia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ecuador - to corner him in London for over six years and prevent him from regaining his freedom. And it may soon succeed in rendering him to the U.S. in shackles.
If this is what happens to Julian, his fate will not differ substantially from that of people who dared to defy the formal, territorial empires of the past. The Saudis conquered most of Arabia in the late 18th century, but their leader Abdullah bin Saudwas defeated, captured, rendered in chains to Istanbul and beheaded at the order of the Ottoman Sultan in 1818.
Until 1830, the British Royal Navy brought mutineers, smugglers and pirates captured on the high seas around the world back to London to be hung (slowly, in the case of pirates) at Execution Dock on the Thames. The most notorious pirates' bodies were covered in tar and hung in chains from a gibbet on the riverbank as a warning against piracy to sailors on passing ships.
If anything can save Julian Assange from a 21st century version of their fate at the hands of today's imperial power, it is empire-wide public outrage and the fear of U.S. officials that such a naked display of imperial power will give their game away.
Since 2001, the U.S. has been more ready than ever to attack or invade other countries at will, with no regard for U.S. or international law, and to kidnap or extradite people from around the world to face imperial retribution in U.S. prisons and courts.But fear of exposing its brutality and criminality rarely constrains the U.S. empire. Since 2001, the U.S. has been more ready than ever to attack or invade other countries at will, with no regard for U.S. or international law, and to kidnap or extradite people from around the world to face imperial retribution in U.S. prisons and courts.
Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, now detained in Canada, is the latest victim of U.S. imperial power. At least 26 U.S. and foreign banks have paid fines of billions of dollars for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, but none of their executives have been arrested and threatened with 30 year prison terms. In launching a trade war with China, challenging Chinese sovereignty to trade with Iran and holding Meng Wanzhou as a hostage or bargaining chip in these disputes, the U.S. is displaying a dogged determination to keep expanding its imperial ambitions.
The case of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden illustrates that there are geographic limits to U.S. imperial power. By escaping first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, Edward evaded capture or extradition. But his narrow escape and the very narrow choices available to him are themselves an illustration of how few places on Earth remain safely beyond the reach of U.S. imperial power.
The End of Empire
The corrosive and debilitating impact of U.S. empire on the sovereignty of other countries has been obvious to its detractors for a long time.
In the introduction to his 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana wrote, "The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside."
Darryl Li quoted Nkrumah's verdict that this is, "...the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress."
Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA the year after his words were published, but his critique remains, begging serious questions, "How long will the world tolerate this irresponsible form of empire?" Or even, " Will we allow this 'last stage of imperialism' to be the last stage of our civilization?"
The way the U.S. empire exercises power through stratified layers of sovereignty is both a strength and a weakness. For a brief period in history, it has enabled the U.S. to wield imperial power in an otherwise post-colonial world, as Nkrumah described.
But Nkrumah had good reason to call this the last stage of imperialism. Once the U.S. empire's subject nations decide to claim in full the legal sovereignty they gained in the 20thcentury, and reject the U.S.'s anachronistic imperial ambitions to dominate and exploit their institutions, their people and their future, this empire cannot permanently hold them back any more than the British or Ottoman Empires could.
This irresponsible empire has squandered the resources of our own and other nations and spawned existential dangers that threaten the whole world, from nuclear war to environmental crisis. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has gradually advanced the hands of its Doomsday Clock from 17 minutes to midnight in 1994 up to 2 minutes to midnight in 2018.
The U.S.'s system of "managed democracy" or "inverted totalitarianism" concentrates ever-growing wealth and power in the hands of a corrupt ruling class, increasingly subjecting the American public to the same "exploitation without redress" as the U.S. empire's foreign subjects and preventing us from tackling serious or even existential problems.
This self-reinforcing vicious circle endangers us all, not least those of us who live at the heart of this corrupt and ultimately self-destructive empire. So we Americans share the vital interest of the rest of the world in dismantling the U.S. empire and starting to work with all our neighbors to build a peaceful, just and sustainable post-imperial future that we all can share.
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Saint Kavanaugh
Of course, in the end, it wouldn’t matter if he were a liar, a lout, a lecher, a drunk and a goon. The president is all those things, minus the drunk part, and he got elected to an office substantially more powerful than a supreme court seat.
Oct 06, 2018
As I was writing this, the FBI report commissioned to canonize Brett Kavanaugh was senators' favorite one-handed auto-erotic aid this morning. I didn't yet know what it would say. Not that it was going to make a difference for 96 percent of senators and 100 percent of Americans. With a Trump courtesan like Lindsey Graham and alumni of the Anita Hill stoning like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch lubricating the Senate Judiciary Committee, it's been pretty obvious since his nomination that Kavanaugh would get enrobed. It wouldn't matter if he were a liar, a lout, a lecher, a drunk and a goon. The president is all those things, minus the drunk part, and he got elected to an office substantially more powerful than a supreme court seat.
So we shouldn't be surprised about his choices. We enabled them. I mean, look at his staff or his cabinet, which has had almost more wife-beaters, racists, fraudsters, felons, traitors and dimwits than even Ronald Reagan's White House managed, and that one finished the show with 138 administration officials investigated, indicted or convicted, most in history. It would have been foolish to expect Trump to nominate a Louis Brandeis or a Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He was going to nominate a man in his image, but with a law degree and the ability to speak in full sentences. He couldn't clone Clarence Thomas. So Kavanaugh is his man.
It appears Thomas's title as the meanest, angriest justice of the last three decades is in jeopardy, now that Kavanagh will elevate the angry white male to judicial supremacy while also ensuring that the other kind of supremacy prevails a few decades longer. And let's not lose sight of the fact that for all the grotesque number of young black men massacred or terrorized by cops, it's taken a millionaire Yalie to awaken the president's anguish that rich white men's libidos matte.
There's fair opposition to Kavanaugh because of his tawdry character, just as there was with Clarence Thomas. But all things being equal-there's little difference between these men's character and the chambers they come from or are joining-my objection to Kavanaugh predates the scandals, at least the boozy and predatory ones.
You may recall that in 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked 7-7 on Clarence Thomas before the revelations of Anita Hill. It was Thomas's lies and philosophy that were a problem. He was a thin-skinned mullah, an extremist ready to return the Warren Court's progressions to the stone age, meaning back to the pre-New Deal days of William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes. That, and the proof of his last 27 sadistic years, is why he shouldn't have been confirmed.
Brett Kavanaugh is Clarence Thomas on meth. Besides writing soft porn as a mercenary (his Long Dong Silver was the Starr Report), there's his role during the George W. Bush administration, starting with helping Bush steal the 2000 election, then becoming part of the legal junta that included John Yoo and David Addington, architects of the war on Americans still euphemized in foxier circles as the "war on terror." His name was not on the memos glorifying waterboarding, black sites, torture, Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, but he was in the room, and of course he lied in his 2006 confirmation hearing when asked about his involvement in terrorism matters.
Admittedly it's not fair to criticize a member of the Bush gang for lying in an administration that immediately signaled that truth-tellers would not be tolerated. So jump to Kavanaugh's years on the federal bench: Abortion? Against. Obamacare? Against. Unions, workplace safety, anything with the word "regulation" in it? Against. Domestic spying? Hell, yes. Police spying on private citizens? Absolutely. A theocratic reading of the First Amendment? Why not. Brown-skin bans? Play Dixie for him. Presidential powers that would arouse even a dead Louis XIV? Strike up the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
That's the man our college of cardinals is confirming to the Supreme Court. If you think that's a "small-government conservative," you might want to rethink your definitions of those three words. There's more activism in a besotted Kavanaugh burp than in all the penumbras of William O. Douglas's opinions. Not that any other man out of Trump's Federalist Society seraglio would be any different. That's the ultimate lesson of the Kavanaugh follies. Confirmed or not, whoever's next in line would be no different. Look at Neil Gorsuch. He might be less personally sleazy, more temperamentally amoebic, but judicially? Same shill, different name.
On the U.S. Supreme Court, it's the 1920s all over again, with triumphalic vengeance.
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