Dec 12th, 2008
Posted by Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU of Southern California at 2:34pm	Human Rights, Immigrants' Rights, National Security

U.S. Complicit in American’s Detention and Torture in the U.A.E.

More than three months ago, a U.S. citizen named Naji Hamdan was arrested by the State Security forces of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). He was detained without charges or access to a lawyer until the ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf. He has since been released into criminal custody in the U.A.E., and reports that he was severely tortured while in detention, apparently in the presence of American officials. Throughout, the U.S. government claimed to know nothing about why he was detained. A few weeks before his arrest, FBI agents from Los Angeles flew to the U.A.E. and interrogated Mr. Hamdan at the Embassy for several hours. This interrogation and the subsequent arrest were only the latest episodes in a two-year period during which the FBI intensively surveilled Mr. Hamdan. Mr. Hamdan's description of the torture and interrogation he endured strongly suggests that American agents have been involved. Although his captors blindfolded him, his interrogators spoke native English with an American accent and were not fluent in Arabic. In addition, the agents interrogated Mr. Hamdan on topics about which only federal agents could have knowledge, such as a meeting he had with FBI agents at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi. His interrogators also asked him in extreme detail about his life and activities when he lived in the United States. After his transfer into criminal custody, Hamdan told both his family and the U.S. consular officer who visited him that he had been severely tortured: repeatedly beaten on his head, kicked on his sides, stripped and held in a freezing cold room, put in an electric chair and made to believe that he would be electrocuted, and held down in a stress position while his captors beat the bottoms of his feet with a large stick. During this horrific process he said whatever the agents wanted him to say, and those statements may now be used against him in a criminal trial in the U.A.E. We believe that Mr. Hamdan is the latest victim of the U.S. government's practice of asking foreign governments to detain terrorism suspects whom the federal government cannot itself detain and interrogate under U.S. law -- a practice known as "proxy detention." By asking other countries to detain on our behalf, the U.S. government apparently believes it can avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution, allowing federal agents to interrogate individuals held in secret, incommunicado detention, without charge or access to a lawyer, and subject to torture. The countries we partner with, like the U.A.E., typically have poor human rights records and weak protections against prolonged arbitrary detention. Although our government has revealed very little about the proxy detention program, it has been documented by groups such as the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. In a perverse way, the government's proxy detention program represents a logical response to the Supreme Court's rulings in the Guantanamo cases. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government's attempt to create a law-free zone at Guantanamo, ruling most recently in Boumediene v. Bush that people in U.S. custody must be able to go to court to challenge their detention. In Naji Hamdan's case, the Bush administration appears to have sidestepped the court by asking a foreign government to detain on its behalf. The ironic twist in this case is that Naji Hamdan was more than willing to talk to FBI agents. He voluntarily submitted to their interrogation several times over the last few years, including meeting them at the U.S. Embassy in the U.A.E. just a few weeks before his arrest. Apparently these conversations revealed no evidence sufficient to allow the FBI to charge him. But instead of accepting that they had made a mistake - as the government has done far too often in terrorism cases over the last several years - they appear to have asked the U.A.E.'s security forces to imprison him so that they could interrogate him free of the constraints of U.S. law. In doing so, American officials would have known that the U.A.E. State Security forces regularly torture those whom they detain. (Amnesty on the U.A.E.'s torture record is here.) Our country owes better to its own citizens. The ACLU's habeas petition asks the government to correct its error by seeking Naji Hamdan's release. In addition, we ask the court to order the government to reveal the nature of its involvement in his detention. I hope the courts will step in to correct this grave injustice. Obviously if Hamdan has done something wrong, he should be charged with a crime. But the basis for those charges cannot be statements obtained under torture. If there is no evidence against him, he should be released. Our government owes him nothing less.

TAKE ACTION! Urge Congress and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to urgently intervene to bring Mr. Hamdan home to the United States, and to ensure that he is not prosecuted in the U.A.E. using evidence obtained through torture.

Permalink |	Human Rights, Immigrants' Rights, National Security

1. scrivener Says:
   Dec 15th, 2008 at 11:14am

   FISA has been misused to enable a series of secret programs used in the extrajudicial targeting of U.S. citizens by government agencies involved in intelligence, law enforcement and revenue collection. These agencies have been hijacked by ideologues who are using the war on terror as a pretext for a peculiar form of social engineering.

   I’m a longtime mainstream journalist whose career, finances and physical well-being have been decimated by these programs. Agencies of government are using “directed energy weapons” that emit silent radiation to slowly incapacitate their targets. THIS IS TORTURE AND IT IS GOING ON IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS AMERICA.

   Please read the following article, and the additional article cited in the link that follows. I have been trying to secure legal assistance on behalf of untold thousands of Americans who have been victimized as I have been over the past five years. I put my 35+ years of credibility on the line here. Only recently have my posts been allowed to go through to the ACLU blog with some consistency. My communications are not just being surveilled — my internet and telephonic communications are subject to malicious interference and interception.

   Please read this article, which is based on first-hand experience and reporting, and please help me arrange a meeting with ACLU attorneys. If this can happen to me, it can (and is) happening to many other innocent Americans:

   …Secret programs are destroying families…

   ‘Extrajudicial Targeting’ of U.S. Citizens by Gov’t Agencies: Root Cause of Global Financial Crisis?

   GET POLITICAL w/ VIC LIVINGSTON columnist, members.nowpublic.com/scrivener; former business reporter, Fox TV Phila., N.Y. Daily News ‘Tonight’, Philadelphia Bulletin, St. Petersburg Times

   Could government “targeting” of American citizens outside the bounds of the judicial system be one of the root causes of the Wall Street financial meltdown that threatens to devastate the global economy?

   Victims of so-called “organized gang stalking” claim that federal and local government agencies involved in intelligence, law enforcement, and revenue collection have established a network of secret programs aimed at destroying the financial well-being of “targeted” individuals — who are denied due process of law as their financial resources are systematically expropriated.

   These programs allegedly involve the interception of mail; surveillance, interception, and alteration of telecommunications, including telephone and internet communications; fabrication of bank, credit card, mortgage and billing statements; surreptitious manipulation of personal and business bank and mortgage accounts.

   Victims of this alleged “extrajudicial targeting” report being inundated with offers of “easy credit” from banks, mortgage companies and credit card issuers — even if their financial situation does not warrant the extension of generous lines of credit. Typically, consumers are lured in by low interest rates — only to see those rates raised to usurious levels months later.

   In effect, victims say, a secret parallel system of transaction processing has been established for persons targeted by government agencies. They allege that the goal is to destroy their capacity to earn a living and to support themselves and their families.

   Victims theorize that these “programs of personal destruction” are a derivative of past controversial government programs such as Cointelpro and Total Information Awareness. They maintain that the enactment of sweeping laws such as the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has emboldened those who would use the powers of the state to restrict civil liberties as a tool of social control.

   The “mechanics” of these programs of personal destruction, victims say, closely resemble the tactics employed by pre-war Nazi Germany in its campaign against the Jews and other targeted groups, such as those deemed to be political “dissenters.”

   Victims charge that some of these programs also are designed to degrade their physical health, with health care professionals sometimes pressured to cooperate. Citizen vigilantes affiliated with government-funded community policing and “watch” groups are employed to relentlessly stalk, harass and intimidate those targeted by these government programs, victims charge.

   These civilian vigilantes, with retired military and public safety officers among their ranks, are said to have access to surveillance imposed upon their targets, who are tracked and followed like prey, whether in vehicles or on foot.

   The vigilante stalkers are believed to be equipped with high-tech instruments such as radiation-emitting “directed energy” weapons capable of causing serious adverse health effects — what some describe as a “slow genocide.”

   Officials in the private sector are believed to have knowledge of some of these programs, since their cooperation is key to the functioning of the system. Victims charge that the government is using national security and the “war on terror” as a pretext to secure the cooperation of local law enforcement, corporations and businesses. But they say it’s also possible that the civilian overseers of these agencies, as well as civilian operatives, have been kept in the dark about the most nefarious aspects of these programs.

   It’s feared that the government takeover of more than half of the nation’s mortgage market, and government bailouts and supervision of failed and financially troubled banks, investment houses and insurers, could facilitate this extrajudicial targeting of citizens and their personal and business assets.

   Those who say they have been victimized by these programs are calling upon Congress to immediately convene hearings on unconstitutional, extra-legal abuses of power carried out under the direction of government agencies — what they see as an unraveling of the American constitutional democracy and a descent into a corporate-fascist police state.

   FOR MORE ON STATE-SUPPORTED DOMESTIC TERRORISM:

   http://www.nowpublic.com/world/american-gestapo-stat e-supported-terrorism-targets-u-s-citizens

   OR (if link is disabled): members.NowPublic.com/scrivener RE: “American Gestapo…”

   (NOTE: MR. Livingston’s bio, contact information and additional writings can be found at his web site.)

2. scrivener Says:
   Dec 15th, 2008 at 1:49pm

   A recent article on the Wired.com magazine "Danger Room" blog site discusses a court document said to indicate that the U.S. Secret Service is involved in the development of directed energy weapons technology. The article speculates that the agency may have deployed such devices in the course of its official duties.

   http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/presidents-secr.h tml

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