Protests mount as Obama's promises to end human rights violations fall flat, says Anayat Durrani When United States President Barack Obama came into office, the world breathed a sigh of relief. He was, after all, a man who promised to close an ugly chapter in American history, shutting down Guantanamo and with it the horrific policies of the Bush administration. But not only is he facing hurdles in closing Guantanamo, but extraordinary renditions and interrogations involving torture are to be continued. In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed, "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." On his second day in office, the president signed an executive order calling for the closure of the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. But on 29 January a military judge at Guantanamo rejected the White House request to drop the charges against Abdel-Rahim Al-Nashiri, creating an unexpected challenge for the administration as it reviews how America puts Guantanamo detainees on trial. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has grudgingly pledged to comply with Obama's request to close Guantanamo within a year but says efforts are at "a standstill" on what to do with the remaining prisoners. Meanwhile, hopes that torture will end have been dashed. It is clear that under the Obama administration, the Central Intelligence Agency still has the authority to carry out renditions, transferring prisoners to other countries where they could well be tortured by foreign government. In an aboutface, the Obama administration sided with Bush's position in a lawsuit involving renditions. In the case, five men claim US operatives abducted them and flew them to other countries to be tortured. Named in the lawsuit is a Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, which they say provided air transportation to the CIA for the "extraordinary rendition" programme. Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, named in the suit alleged that after his kidnapping and transport to Morocco, "his interrogators routinely beat him, sometimes to the point of losing consciousness, and he suffered multiple broken bones. During one incident, Mohamed was cut 20 to 30 times on his genitals. On another occasion, a hot stinging liquid was poured into open wounds on his penis. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death. He was forced to listen to loud music day and night, placed in a room with open sewage for a month at a time and drugged repeatedly." Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 before being taken to Morocco and Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo. He was accused of attending an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and of plotting to build a radioactive "dirty bomb", but has never been charged. Justice Department lawyers told the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco that state secrets could be disclosed and national security would be at risk should the court allow the suit to proceed. The administration made its argument Tuesday in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which was hearing an appeal in a 2007 case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said the Obama administration's position was a continuation of Bush's policy "of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same." As a presidential candidate, Romero said Obama ran on a platform that sought to reform the abuse of state secrets. "If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again." Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU, who argued the case for the plaintiffs expressed shock and deep disappointment over the Justice Department's position to continue the Bush administration's dodging of "judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture". Wizner said this was an opportunity for the Obama administration to demonstrate its condemnation of torture and rendition but it instead stayed in line with the Bush era policy. "Now we must hope that the court will assert its independence by rejecting the government's false claims of state secrets and allowing the victims of torture and rendition their day in court," said Wizner. It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege, according to the ACLU. The government has used the "state secrets" claim in recent years with more frequency "in an attempt to throw out lawsuits and justify withholding information from the public not only about the rendition programme, but also about illegal wiretapping, torture and other breaches of US and international law," the organisation said. While President Obama's choice for CIA head, Leon Panetta, told the Senate Intelligence Committee the Obama administration would reverse some policies of the Bush administration, he said it would not rule out sending detainees to other countries for interrogation and imprisonment, on condition that they are "treated humanely", a statement that has been widely ridiculed. Panetta called waterboarding torture but said intelligence officers who applied the practice of simulating drowning should not be prosecuted. On interrogation techniques, he said he would not hesitate to ask the president for additional authority if there was "a ticking-bomb situation". On Guantanamo, he argued that some prisoners might have to be detained without trial for a longer period of time than the proposed one-year deadline for closing the notorious prison. World opinion is quickly turning against Obama on human rights. This week, a panel organised by the International Commission of Jurists condemned the very idea of the "war on terror" of the Bush regime, citing Guantanamo, renditions, torture, military tribunals, the culture of secrecy associated with the violation of international laws, which afforded impunity to those acting unlawfully. The chairman, Arthur Chaskalson, a former chief justice of South Africa said that US abuses encouraged countries everywhere to do the same. The "war paradigm" adopted by Bush after 9/ 11 "has done immense damage in the last seven years to a previously shared international consensus on the framework underlying both human rights and humanitarian law," the report said. "This consensus needs to be recreated and reasserted." Also this week, Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state. "It has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification."
