Demand transparency on torture from the White House

Passing on this important online action by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee:

Demand transparency on torture from the White House

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve a 6,000 page report on torture based on a three year investigation that reviewed over 6 million pages of documents from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. While the Senate report is sharply critical of torture, however, it remains secret.

Sign this petition to remind America what we once stood for.

The Obama administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee could help advance the debate. Simply allowing the press and the public to read the committee's report would expose the film’s potentially misleading narrative.

Sign this petition to tell the White House that you demand transparency on torture and the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report to the public.

For more information and further analysis, visit The People's Blog for the Constitution, and download flyers to take action locally.

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

We, the undersigned, write to remind you that torture is wrong, immoral, unconstitutional, universally illegal, and has proven harmful to US national security, and also to urge you to promote transparency, as you have repeatedly promised.

The extensive report approved in December 2012 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could inform the public about an area of persisting secrecy and escalating controversy. We urge you to immediately declassify the report and enable its unredacted release to the public and the press.

Your pledge to promote transparency requires no less. So do domestic and international law, which impose an affirmative obligation to investigate all credible reports of torture and pursue prosecution of all culprits, whatever their position or rank. So far, your administration has dramatically failed that responsibility, choosing political expediency over the rule of law.

In your second term, your administration could address this failure by supporting efforts to promote transparency and accountability, starting by declassifying the Senate Intelligence Committee's report in order to enable its vital release to the public.

With mass incarceration subjecting millions of Americans to a "new Jim Crow" racial caste system, the impunity with which architects of torture flaunt their (in many cases, public, and even judicial) positions makes a mockery of our criminal justice system. Prosecution of only the powerless, and impunity for the powerful, represents a flagrant double standard that ultimately encourages disrespect and disdain for the law.

We eagerly look forward to reading the Senate's findings, and to thanking your administration for helping make your rhetoric a reality.

Sincerely,

TO SIGN THIS PETITION, YOU MUST CLICK HERE AND SCROLL TO BOTTOM OF THE PAGE

What's Past is Prologue: the Case of COINTELPRO (Video)

In "Notes on Civil Liberties" this morning, Kevin highlighted the Bill of Rights Defense Committee's (BORDC) campaign, "Shine a Light on the FBI." I thought I'd add a bit to that discussion.

BORDC, along with 40 other organizations, including Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Torture Accountability, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Defending Dissent Foundation and the National Lawyers Guild, among others, wrote a letter [PDF] on July 12 to members of Congress, "request[ing] that you vote against the White House proposal to extend the term of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III. The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislation to implement the proposal, but did so without adequate process and without meaningfully addressing any of the numerous outstanding oversight issues and constitutional abuses for which the Bureau continues to evade accountability."

As part of their campaign, BORDC has produced a great short video, "The unPATRIOTic Act & COINTELPRO 2.0," in which a number of former FBI and U.S. military figures, along with human rights activists, explain how the Patriot Act and government surveillance of and attacks on current activists, including Quakers and antiwar groups, are redolent of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program of the 1950s-1970s. The video is definitely worth viewing.



On the earlier COINTELPRO program, see this 1976 report by the U.S. Senate's Church committee, or this webpage dedicated to the subject at Political Research Associates, which includes links to many of the released COINTELPRO documents.

Despite the fact the FBI used agents provocateurs, forged documents, and various nefarious activities, including trying to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide, no U.S. officials were ever prosecuted for these activities.

BORDC reminds us that those interested can sign on to their letter to Congress.

Originally posted at The Dissenter/FDL

Congress Says Government Can Seize Your Personal & Business Records, and Then Gag Your Ability to Talk About It

The People's Blog for the Constitution (blog of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee) recently discussed the implications of the new reauthorization of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. This legislation has amounted to a direct assault on U.S. civil liberties, and Congress has been totally and abjectly complicit in reauthorizing these laws over and over again, since first proposed by the Bush Administration in 2002.

Four more years of the PATRIOT Act will worsen government secrecy

On May 26, 2011, Congress voted to reauthorize three provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT that were set to expire. The most contentious of these provisions is Section 215, which allows the government to more easily gain access to various personal records without clear evidence that the individual in question poses a threat to national security. This provision also places a gag order on anyone whose records have been seized so they can’t talk about what happened.

If the thought of the government accessing your business or medical records, telephone calls, books, diaries, and even your genetic information (go to page 87) isn’t scary enough, the most frightening aspect of this provision is that we don’t know how the government actually interprets and applies it. In part, this is because the Justice Department has refused to reveal the government’s interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

Prior to Congress’s vote on the reauthorization of the PATRIOT ACT, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall proposed an amendment that would require the US Attorney General to publicly reveal the government’s official interpretation of the PATRIOT ACT. Wyden claims,

“[T]he government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are… and the reliance on secret interpretations of the law is growing.”

Unfortunately, the proposed amendment failed and the law was reauthorized until 2015.
The government’s refusal to explain, much less meaningfully reform, this provision of the PATRIOT Act is hardly the first time that this piece of legislation has been used to infringe on the rights of people in the United States. The increasing use of national security letters (NSLs) to demand personal records without court approval has resulted in an estimated 6,400 intelligence violations. Some of these violations took the form of exigent letters, which do not exist anywhere in the law, but according to the Inspector General’s investigation, “contained inaccurate statements, circumvented the requirements of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act NSL statute, and violated Attorney General Guidelines and internal FBI policy.”

Despite widespread and well-documented abuses, Congress reauthorized the PATRIOT Act for another four years without any protections for civil liberties. Congress has failed to check and balance the Executive Branch on civil liberties issues, allowing executive secrecy to become entrenched—and this failure has implications far beyond surveillance.  With the Obama administration prosecuting more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined (including some who risked prosecution by exposing important facts about surveillance), Congress’s abandonment of its oversight responsibilities on the PATRIOT Act bodes poorly for the future.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has already stated that it will ask the courts to disclose information that Congress wouldn’t. On May 31, the ACLU filed a  Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding that the government reveal its interpretation of Section 215. Keep checking this blog and the ACLU for updates on that case and other news about the PATRIOT Act and civil liberties.