Justice has no meaning in the justice system. The system works according to the law. Whether the law is fair or just has no particular bearing on the outcomes. A quote from deceased supreme court judge Scalia offers insight into our entire concept of justice: "Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached."
And that is it. Innocence doesn't count for anything in the system we call the criminal justice system, where in truth it is the system itself that is criminal. And, if one is waiting for 'justice' in the United States of America, it is a long wait... a very long wait, indeed.
If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no jobs through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.
If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era. Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty.
The “Reid technique” that investigators are taught to elicit confessions from people, and how it can often get false ones. Read this piece on how that happens. Excerpt:
Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—including those convicted in such notorious cases as the Central Park Five. The extent of the problem is unknowable, because there’s no national database on wrongful convictions. But false confessions, which often lead to these convictions, are not rare, and experts say that Reid-style interrogations can produce them.
There have been 337 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States.
The first DNA exoneration took place in 1989. Exonerations have been won in 37 states; since 2000, there have been 263 exonerations. 20 of the 336 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row. Another 16 were charged with capital crimes but not sentenced to death. The average length of time served by exonerees is 14 years.
Arrestees are placed on a waiting list for representation before the court. The people of Louisiana who are made to wait in line are those most at risk in our 'criminal' justice system: usually poor, often a person of color, and facing severe sentences. Yet, these are the people who most need the public defender’s help investigating the state’s case against them and quickly uncovering favorable evidence before it is lost.
This is why the ACLU and the ACLU of Louisiana yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against the New Orleans public defender’s office as well as the Louisiana Public Defender Board for failing to abide by defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to legal representation. 
Guantánamo, offers a stark contrast to how we deal with people believed to have engaged in activities perceived, if not proved, to be against the best interests of the United States. It would not occur to us to summarily execute them as Saudi Arabia did the unfortunate 47. Instead we permit them to live happily ever after in facilities furnished by the U.S. Government without charging them (a) for room and board or (b) with any acts of misconduct.
As of the first of the year the United States has magnanimously spent, without hope of reimbursement, $5.2 billion in order to enable the people at Guantánamo to reside there. Many of the residents of Guantánamo continue to live there even though they have been cleared for release. As of this writing there are men in confinement, 44 of whom have been cleared for release. Fifty-two of the men confined have never been charged with any crimes and some of them have been in residence since 2002. They have been given the cutesy names of “forever prisoners” since they have no prospect of being charged with any criminal conduct nor of ever being released. Being one of the “forever prisoners” at Guantánamo is, of course, better than being one of the 47 former prisoners in Saudi Arabia because a “forever prisoner” is still alive whereas the former prisoners are all dead. Some of the “forever prisoners” may not, however, continue to enjoy the benefits of this distinction. One of them is Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemini prisoner. He has been cleared for release for 7 years but is still imprisoned. He has been on a hunger strike for 9 years and is now severely malnourished. He is at death’s, but not the prison’s, door. That is because a country that has tentatively agreed to accept him wants to review his medical records before doing so. The Pentagon has reportedly been slow to hand them over on the grounds that it is protecting Mr. Odah’s right to privacy. The Pentagon places the right to privacy above the right to life and liberty. Mr. Odah probably doesn’t get the difference. He probably never will. That is because he may be dead before it is explained to him. Other “forever prisoners” may also find it hard to understand why they are better off in Guantánamo than dead. 
How can we reduce the enormous populations of our country's local jails? Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York unveiled a plan to decrease the population of the Rikers Island jail complex by reducing the backlog of cases in state courts. About 85 percent of those at Rikers haven't been convicted of any offense; they're just awaiting trial, sometimes for as long as hundreds of days.
Mayor de Blasio's plan is a positive step. Yet it ignores a deeper question: Why are so many people - particularly poor people of color - in jail awaiting trial in the first place? Usually, it is because they cannot afford bail. According to a 2011 report by the city's Independent Budget Office, 79 percent of pretrial detainees were sent to Rikers because they couldn't post bail right away. This is a national problem. Across the United States, most of the people incarcerated in local jails have not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting trial. And most of those are waiting in jail not because of any specific risk they have been deemed to pose, but because they can't pay their bail. In other words, we are locking people up for being poor. This is unjust. We should abolish monetary bail outright. Some will argue that bail is necessary to prevent flight before trial, but there is no good basis for that assumption. For one thing, people considered to pose an unacceptable risk of flight (or violence) are not granted bail in the first place. (Though the procedures for determining who poses a risk themselves ought to be viewed with skepticism, especially since conceptions of risk are often shaped, tacitly or otherwise, by racist assumptions.) There is also evidence that bail is not necessary to ensure that people show up for trial. In Washington, DC, a city that makes virtually no use of monetary bail, the vast majority of arrestees who are released pretrial do return to court, and rates of additional crime before trial are low. In addition to being unjust and unnecessary, pretrial incarceration can have harmful consequences. Not only do those who are in jail before trial suffer the trauma of confinement, but in comparison with their bailed-out counterparts, they are also more likely to be convicted at trial. As documented in a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, the legal system is substantially tougher to navigate from behind bars. People in jail face more pressure to accept plea bargains - often, ones that aren't to their advantage - than do those confronting their charges from home. Those who spend even a few days in jail can lose their jobs or housing during that time. Single parents can lose custody of their children. By exacerbating the effects of poverty, and by placing people in often traumatizing circumstances, pretrial incarceration may actually lead to more crime. Bail also raises issues of racial injustice. A number of studies have shown that black defendants are assigned higher bail amounts than their white counterparts. This discrepancy is compounded by the fact that black people disproportionately live in poverty and thus unduly face challenges in paying bail. Other burdens of bail also fall harder on people of color. For instance, black mothers face a particularly serious risk of losing custody of their children while incarcerated, because they are excessively targeted by child protective services. Jails disproportionately confine mentally ill people, too - rates of mental illness are four to six times higher in jail than outside - and people with mental health problems often live in economic circumstances that make it difficult to afford bail. A study released in February by the Vera Institute of Justice found that one-third of jailed people with mental illness were unemployed before being arrested. Finally, monetary bail is at odds with the legal ideal of the presumption of innocence. If we want to grant people this presumption, we must not punish them before their trials. There is no getting around it: We are incarcerating people for being poor, at great cost to actual human lives. We have to stop.  |
Just who are we, anyhow? Exactly what is our national identity?
a redacted page from The Senate Intelligence Committee executive summary the CIA's "Detention and interrogation Program."... more correctly called "The Torture Program"...
As individuals, most of us learned some concept of 'right' and 'wrong' as very little children. From the very beginning, we were led to understand certain ideas about this is ok, but this other thing is not ok. Don't hit... This belongs to that child over there... Tell the truth... Don't take what is not yours... were lessons we learned at home and in school. These moral directions were stressed because the need to understand was imperative for getting along in the world. Humans must have some commonly recognized moral code with which to conduct themselves among other humans.
Most of us continued to learn those lessons and to adopt them as guide-lines for our lives as adults. The leaders of our nation continually refer to moral reasoning for our domestic and international policy decisions.
Unfortunately, on occasion, we have leaders who are seriously deficient in this regard. They claim, and some of us believe, that we can re-write the moral code to suit whatever circumstances we feel best benefits our own desires at any particular point. They make-up multiple excuses to allow themselves, and us, to break with moral standards. They lead us to torture people... to inflict horrible and brutal pain on an individual of their choosing. They incorporate pain that is mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and every other type of pain that they are able to conceive.
They claim they are 'saving' us by inflicting this pain and suffering on this person. They claim that unless they use torturous techniques, we will not be saved. Some of us believe them.
But, there is a truth involved in all of this. There has been extensive research over and extended period of time regarding the effectiveness of torturing people to gain information from that person. The truth, as indicated by all of the evidence, is that torturing people will not get the information one seeks.
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The truth is that the person being tortured wishes for the torture to stop and will say whatever they are able to say to make the torture stop. The victim attempts, as best they are able, to say what they believe the torturer wants to hear whether it is true or not... they will say what they believe the torturer wants for them to say in the hope of causing the torturer to stop torturing them. The information gained through the process is not reliable information. We know this and have known it for a long time.
This is a truth that is well known. This truth has been well established over a long time.
With this truth in mind, one wants to ask, "what then would be the reason or the purpose for torturing people?"
There are many answers to the question and again, many of the answers have been well established for a long period of time. One answer is sadistic pleasure. Some people enjoy the power they have over the other person and enjoy inflicting pain and enjoy watching the person suffer. And, from a position of power, these types of people can joyfully sit around creating more imaginative methods of torture.
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A person who is filled with compassion for their fellow human being could not inflict horrible suffering on another human being. This is especially true given the knowledge that torture does not work toward the stated goals of securing valuable information.
There are wide variations between the person given over to compassion and the person given over to sadistic pleasure. There are wide variations between good and evil.
When the United States of America adopts certain principles as policy, we are all complicit to one degree or another. That most of us fall into the camp of believing that torture is 'wrong', but still sit at home and allow our national and state governments to conduct torture as official policy speaks very poorly for all of us.
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That we have tortured and do torture is one thing by itself. To face those within our midst who want to stop this torture with threats and lies is something again. That we seek to hide something of which the entire world is aware is unbelievably stupid. Everyone knows what we have done. Everyone knows it was not effective (by its very definition it is not effective). Everyone hears our incredible excuses with disbelief.
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To torture people is evil. That much is absolutely true!
The system of 'justice' used to select among the world's population those who are to be tortured can only bring tears to one's eyes. Justice was blinded by witnessing this type of scenario... arbitrary, prejudiced, capricious judgements.
At the top of this blog is a photo of a redacted page from The Senate Intelligence Committee 525-page executive summary of the investigative report which looked at the CIA's "Detention and interrogation Program."
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Please take a moment to look through the parts not 'blacked out' and notice that this page seems to be focused on those people who were tortured 'by mistake'... Abu Hudhaifa was tortured and then released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be… Muhammad Khan, who like Zarmein, was among detainees about whom the CIA acknowledged knowing ‘very little’... Gul Rahman, another case of mistaken identity... Haji Ghalgi was detained as ‘useful leverage’ against a family member.
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If these 'mistakes' were so innocent as to not be 'blacked out', can one imagine what was so bad that the government sought to hide it by 'blacking it out"?
And the truth is that it is not hidden. The whole world knows the truth of our criminal actions. What the world would like to see at this point is our acknowledging our crimes and our dealing justly with the criminals involved... it is not a secret, everyone knows...
Trevor Timm at The Guardian: "Stop believing the lies: America tortured more than 'some folks' – and covered it up"
The executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation writes:
The torture defenders from the CIA and the Bush administration probably won’t even make a serious attempt to say they didn’t torture anyone – just that it was effective, that there were “serious mistakes”, but that “countless lives have been saved and our Homeland is more secure” – with a capital H.
This highlights the mistake of the Senate committee, in a way. Instead of focusing on the illegal nature of the torture, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s investigators worked to document torture’s ineffectiveness. The debate, now, is whether torture worked. It clearly didn’t. But the debate should be: Why the hell aren’t these torturous liars in jail?
The executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation writes:
The torture defenders from the CIA and the Bush administration probably won’t even make a serious attempt to say they didn’t torture anyone – just that it was effective, that there were “serious mistakes”, but that “countless lives have been saved and our Homeland is more secure” – with a capital H.
This highlights the mistake of the Senate committee, in a way. Instead of focusing on the illegal nature of the torture, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s investigators worked to document torture’s ineffectiveness. The debate, now, is whether torture worked. It clearly didn’t. But the debate should be: Why the hell aren’t these torturous liars in jail?
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein's official statement highlights four key findings of CIA torture report
The study’s 20 findings and conclusions, according to Feinstein's statement, can be grouped into four central themes, each of which is supported extensively in the Executive Summary:
1. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not effective.
2. The CIA provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public.
3. The CIA’s management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed.
4. The CIA program was far more brutal than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public.
The study’s 20 findings and conclusions, according to Feinstein's statement, can be grouped into four central themes, each of which is supported extensively in the Executive Summary:
1. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not effective.
2. The CIA provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public.
3. The CIA’s management of the program was inadequate and deeply flawed.
4. The CIA program was far more brutal than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public.
Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders said:
“A great nation must be prepared to acknowledge its errors. This report details an ugly chapter in American history during which our leaders and the intelligence community dishonored our nation’s proud traditions. Of course we must aggressively pursue international terrorists who would do us harm, but we must do so in a way that is consistent with the basic respect for human rights which makes us proud to be Americans.
“The United States must not engage in torture. If we do, in an increasingly brutal world we lose our moral standing to condemn other nations or groups that engage in uncivilized behavior.”
“A great nation must be prepared to acknowledge its errors. This report details an ugly chapter in American history during which our leaders and the intelligence community dishonored our nation’s proud traditions. Of course we must aggressively pursue international terrorists who would do us harm, but we must do so in a way that is consistent with the basic respect for human rights which makes us proud to be Americans.
“The United States must not engage in torture. If we do, in an increasingly brutal world we lose our moral standing to condemn other nations or groups that engage in uncivilized behavior.”
Legal Director of Center for Constitutional Rights: "Criminal Prosecutions Must Follow Senate CIA Torture Report Findings"
Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Baher Azmy issued this statement:
The long-delayed Senate report proves what we have been saying since 2006: that the CIA engaged in a sophisticated program of state-sanctioned torture, notable for its elaborate planning and ruthless application. We have witnessed firsthand the devastating human consequences in meetings with our clients at Guantanamo. The report also exposes the CIA’s lies about how the program operated and the utility of the information obtained: False claims about the usefulness of that information were used to justify and cover up monstrous crimes. We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture program. They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under the principles of universal jurisdiction.
Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Baher Azmy issued this statement:
The long-delayed Senate report proves what we have been saying since 2006: that the CIA engaged in a sophisticated program of state-sanctioned torture, notable for its elaborate planning and ruthless application. We have witnessed firsthand the devastating human consequences in meetings with our clients at Guantanamo. The report also exposes the CIA’s lies about how the program operated and the utility of the information obtained: False claims about the usefulness of that information were used to justify and cover up monstrous crimes. We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture program. They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under the principles of universal jurisdiction.
Ray McGovern responds:
"It is bizarre; the Executive and Congress both live in fear of the thugs of the CIA, who have now been joined by Secretary of State John Kerry (probably after checking with the White House) issuing spurious warnings regarding the dangers of releasing the report -- as if the 'bad guys' have not yet heard of CIA torture! No one -- Democrat or Republican -- wants the truth to get out about torture techniques authorized by the Bush/Cheney administration, techniques actually |  |
demonstrated multiple times in the White House itself to the administration's most senior national security and justice officials, and then implemented by CIA thugs.
"Far too many 'notables' approved the torture or, at least, had guilty knowledge -- House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, for example. Likely, an eviscerated ('redacted' is the euphemism) Senate report on CIA torture is all we will be permitted to read. At that point, the ball will be squarely in lame-duck Sen. Mark Udall's court. Will he feel bound by the Omerta-style oath of silence typical of Establishment Washington, or will he have the courage to get the truth out, using his Constitutionally protected right to do so without legal jeopardy?"
"Far too many 'notables' approved the torture or, at least, had guilty knowledge -- House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, for example. Likely, an eviscerated ('redacted' is the euphemism) Senate report on CIA torture is all we will be permitted to read. At that point, the ball will be squarely in lame-duck Sen. Mark Udall's court. Will he feel bound by the Omerta-style oath of silence typical of Establishment Washington, or will he have the courage to get the truth out, using his Constitutionally protected right to do so without legal jeopardy?"
The list of people and their quotes could go on and on because there is a large world-wide outcry against what we have done. That we continue to deny it and continue trying to hide the truth only demonstrates that we really don't know the difference between right and wrong... and that's the truth !!!
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