Clinton Fein’s Torture

Images from Clinton Fein’s 2007 exhibition at the Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco that sought to explore our nation’s use of torture during the Bush regime. Consisting of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images, Fein attempts to disrupt our (visual) complacency to images of torture by recreating scenes from Abu Ghraib in vivid, large-scale “reproductions” of the original exposing pictures.

Extraordinary Rendition by Andrew Becraft

Dear President Obama,

Let’s try delivering on that campaign promise to close Guantánamo Bay.

Cheers,
daniel extra

[via:legoexpress]

Liberty has been secured!

Dubya Era throwback but still a powerful editorial cartoon. And frankly, not much has changed under Obama in terms of rule of law, due process and habeas corpus for detainees held without charges or trial.

[via:fuckyeahpoliticalcartoons]

One core truth that I taught to more than 5,000 service members is that torture, stress and duress, fear and despair and the heartless brutality that is physical and psychological coercion do not work. There is no yardstick long enough to measure the failure of torturers. I can say to you quite assuredly that torture never works.

Malcolm W. Nance, Counter-terror intelligence specialist and combat veteran

More about torture from Amnesty International USA.

[via:caraobrien]

Check out this slide presentation by MotherJones.com on Obama’s record at Gitmo, which is deplorable. Rule of law? Habeas corpus? Treated fundamentally the same during the Dubya regime.

Six months after President Obama halted all transfers of Guantánamo Bay detainees to Yemen, the moratorium is coming under escalating pressure from federal judges — raising doubts about its sustainability.

In an order issued Thursday, Judge Paul L. Friedman told the Obama administration to release a Yemeni detainee, Hussain Salem Mohammed Almerfedi, saying there was no legal basis to keep him in prison after he has been held for about eight years without trial.

[…]

Robert Chesney, a national-security law specialist at the University of Texas, said the Yemeni moratorium had created a difficult policy dilemma.

If the administration lifts the moratorium to avoid losing those cases, it could be attacked by conservatives for sending detainees to Yemen whom it had not been ordered to release, he said. But if it keeps the moratorium, it could face a string of defeats that will undercut its effort to keep holding other detainees.

“The coverage of the Odaini case made them look ridiculous,” Mr. Chesney said. “Imagine them experiencing some 50-plus individual defeats. By the time they are done, the narrative of the innocent detainee being blindly or stupidly detained by the administration would be so entrenched that there would be real strategic harm to the administration’s case that there are people they actually need to and can justify keeping in military detention.”

+ at The New York Times

The real policy problem here is the administration’s belief that prolonged military detention without trial can be reconciled with habeas corpus. The moratorium rests on this false premise. Any dignified judge committed to the separation of powers and rule of law would consistently and rightfully rule against the Obama administration. What the Justice Department needs to work out is how to maintain detainees within the legal framework of our land; otherwise, there is no justification or moral integrity in the extraordinary rendition of the innocent until proven guilty.