ACLU Comment on Leaked Targeted Killing Documents

The ACLU issued the following earlier this week:



October 15, 2015

NEW YORK — The Intercept released documents today showing that the government’s targeted killing operations are rife with intelligence shortcomings and frequent civilian casualties. The papers also reveal that the reality of the operations is far from the public picture presented by the government.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, had this reaction:
“These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets. In fact, the government often claims successes that are really tragic losses. The Obama administration’s lethal program desperately needs transparency and accountability because it is undermining the right to life and national security.”
The ACLU is currently litigating several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to uncover more about who the government has killed and why, as well as the legal basis for its operations.

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Isakson Statement on Hickey Resignation

Senator Johnny Isakson is the Chair of the Senate Veterans Committee and his office issued  the following yesterday:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, October 16, 2015
Contact: Amanda Maddox,  202-224-7777

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Isakson Statement on Hickey Resignation

Calls on Secretary McDonald to quickly nominate candidate who will reform VBA

 

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, today released the following statement about the resignation of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Under Secretary for Benefits Allison Hickey:

 

“Recent findings by the Inspector General clearly show that the Veterans Benefits Administration desperately needs new leadership. The systemic culture of fraud, waste and gross misuse of taxpayer money by VA executives for their own personal gain ‎while veterans benefits claims have been backlogged for years is appalling and must end. While I thank Under Secretary Hickey for her military service, this is an opportunity for Secretary McDonald to nominate someone who will hold bad actors within the VA accountable and reform the Veterans Benefits Administration. I strongly urge Secretary McDonald to nominate someone as quickly as possible - this is not a position that the VBA can afford to have vacant for long.”

 

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The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is chaired by U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in the 114th Congress.

Isakson is a veteran himself – having served in the Georgia Air National Guard from 1966-1972 – and has been a member of the Senate VA Committee since he joined the Senate in 2005. Isakson’s home state of Georgia is home to more than a dozen military installations representing each branch of the military as well as more than 750,000 veterans.

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This is from the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Obama shows his commitment to close Guantánamo by fighting release of 74-pound hunger striking prisoner

October 17, 2015

• By Aliya Hana Hussain

That is the cruel and absurd world of Guantánamo, where Tariq Ba Odah, long cleared for release by every U.S. security agency, still languishes in a cell 13 years on, waiting for the State Department and the Pentagon to finally agree on when to free him.

On Thursday, I joined Tariq’s attorney, CCR’s Omar Farah, in Washington DC, where he urged U.S. District Court Judge Hogan to order the Obama administration to release Tariq on medical grounds. Tariq has been on hunger strike, protesting his indefinite detention, since 2007. At 36-years old, he weighs roughly the same amount as the average 10-year old American boy—just 74 pounds. For more than 8 years he has been force-fed by prison staff every day.

Judge Hogan repeated these damning facts throughout the hearing, clearly concerned about Tariq’s grave medical condition and his prolonged imprisonment. “I’m not sure what the government is doing,” he said. “I don’t understand the delays.”

Omar argued that whether or not the government ever had the authority to imprison Tariq to begin with, that authority had surely now expired under section 3-12 of Army Regulation 190-8, which incorporates elements of the Geneva Conventions into US law and calls for the humanitarian release of gravely ill prisoners.  The government’s lawyers were asked directly, but could give no explanation as to why Tariq’s weight hasn’t increased even though he is forcibly-fed 2600 calories a day. Still they asserted that at 74 pounds he is “clinically stable”, and therefore ineligible for these humanitarian law protections. Moreover, they tried to convince the Court to stay-its-hand in this urgent dispute by claiming that Tariq is not entitled to these basic humanitarian law protections because the government unilaterally declared that he lacks prisoner-of-war status.

That’s the Obama Justice Department in 2015 making the same Bush-era arguments, taking exception to the Geneva Conventions, that President Obama once disavowed and the Supreme Court roundly criticized in Boumediene v. Bush.

It is troubling, indeed schizophrenic, that this is what the Obama administration says in court to a dying man, all while trying to convince the American public that it has a “new” plan to empty the prison. If the administration can’t work together to free Tariq, how could it possibly close Guantánamo?

Meanwhile, Tariq’s life is on the line, and with each additional day the consequences of the president’s inaction get more dire. In his concluding remarks, Omar articulated why the court’s intervention is so necessary.

“The government does not actually oppose Mr. Ba Odah’s release. It is here fighting on principle…so that the government can maintain the right to warehouse Mr. Ba Odah and force-feed his 74-pound frame to keep him alive only to prolong his detention,though he is cleared, so it  can release him at the time and place of the government’s choosing…That's an alarming distortion of the government's detention authority. The Court should determine that this has gone on long enough.”

We hope Judge Hogan will not let this cruel injustice continue.

Read more

October 2, 2015

September 17, 2015

September 16, 2015

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