Will Obama make a clean break with the Bush interrogation, detention and rendition policies?

[bigtree]

Nat Hentoff: Does U.S. secretly hold thousands?

12/11/2008

The next president "has supported increased oversight of the secret CIA detention program and efforts to restrict the CIA to interrogation techniques used by the military," according to the Nov. 6 Wall Street Journal report by Jess Bravin and Siobhan Gorman -- journalists with exemplary records on constitutional issues. Does Obama intend no more than oversight of those "black sites," thereby continuing their noxious existence?

Will the Obama oversight let us know who's being held and by what American rules of law? Will the Geneva Conventions, embedded in one of our laws, be the standard for interrogations? And will the Bush-administration rule continue that whatever "alternative interrogation methods" are allowed must be kept secret lest terrorists be trained to deal with them?


Under Obama, will the CIA continue to have some of the special powers George W. Bush continually authorized? On Dec. 3, 12 retired generals -- representing three dozen retired military officers -- met with the president-elect's transition team to -- as The Washington Post reported -- "plead for a clean, unequivocal break with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition (kidnapping suspects to be tortured in other countries) policies."

I bring into the conversation Clive Stafford Smith, director of the British Reprieve organization. He and his other lawyers have represented prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; and he himself has done extensive research on CIA "black sites" and their ghost prisoners.

In the Nov. 2 New York Post, a customarily conservative newspaper, Smith notes that the much publicized Guantanamo detainees "represent fewer than 1 percent" of the thousands of prisoners held beyond the rule of law (by the Bush administration).

Along with reporters in Europe and here, Smith has found locations of some of these black holes. He cites, among other sites, Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, Diego Garcia, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Morocco and U.S. prison ships, harkening back to the hulks of Charles Dickens. And, he adds tellingly: "Not one of these ghost prisoners has ever encountered a human right, let alone a lawyer."

What will Obama's "centrist" position be on these ghost prisoners?


read more: http://www.leader-vindicator.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20218757&BRD=2758&PAG=461&dept_id=572980&rfi=6

[BelgianMadCow]

1. Easy. Constitutional law professor

resounding yes

[bigtree]

2. I've never heard him speak on the 'black sites'

. . . I wonder if Hayden bothered to brief him on those?

[Vincardog]

3. More importantly will OBama hold bush responsible Bush interrogation, detention and rendition policy

[aldo]

4. If not, then he's a fraud or simply the puppet POTUS. eom

nt