Last week the Federal Bar Council presented Judge Robert A. Katzmann with its Learned Hand Award.  In accepting this prestigious award, Judge Katzmann used the opportunity to reiterate his call to address the urgent need for adequate legal representation for indigent immigrants and asylum seekers.  As Judge Katzmann explained in his speech accepting the Learned Hand Award:

Since 2006, the Second Circuit has adjudicated more than 16,000 immigration cases.  In all too many cases, I could not but notice a substantial impediment to the fair and effective administration of justice: the too-often deficient counsel of represented non-citizens.  For immigrants, the stakes could not be greater – whether they can stay in the United States, whether they will be separated from their loved ones, often their children.

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Bahraini human rights advocate Husain Abdulla looks at the Bahraini Children's Art Exhibition. (Photo By Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call)

In early 2011, the government of Bahrain met calls for democracy with a violent crackdown. Dozens of people were killed, and thousands arrested. Today, the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters continues and King Hamad and his unelected government remain in place.

Children have witnessed much of this violence first hand and we asked some of them to draw something from their experience. These are now being exhibited on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Many of the drawings feature tents at the “Pearl Roundabout”––the center of democracy protests in Bahrain during February and March 2011, and also the “Down Down Hamad” slogan.

We asked clinicians with experience in trauma to look at the drawings and make an assessment––these are also included. In one typical example, the clinical analysis describes a drawing as “overtly indicative of trauma. This child is experiencing heightened emotions, particularly fear, sorrow, and anger. She appears to be in an acute phase of grief.”

View the gallery. The exhibition will be displayed on Capitol Hill, from May 7-11, 2012, in the United Methodist Building, 100 Maryland Ave, NE (Lobby). The exhibition will also be displayed at other U.S. venues throughout the year.

At Monday’s State Department press briefing, Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner stated that the State Department has “called on all countries to stop supplying weapons, arms to – munitions to the Syrian regime.” But Mr. Toner seemed unaware of the extent to which the United States Government itself supports Assad’s primary arms supplier, Rosoboronexport, with a multi-million dollar contract. When asked about this contract, Toner replied, “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.  The only thing you might be referring to is we do have a limited contract with Russia to provide helicopter parts, I think, for some helicopters that are – that have been loaned to the Afghan – or sold or given to the Afghan military.  That, I think, is the extent.”

But that is not the extent. Since the Syrian uprising started last March, the United States has continued to do business with Russian State arms broker Rosoboronexport, including signing a no-bid, fixed price foreign sales contract worth $375 million to purchase 21 Mi series helicopters and spare parts for the Afghan Army in May 2011. This contract comes with the option to purchase an additional $550 million in arms, which the Department of Defense is now exercising, which raises the total value of the contract to nearly $1 billion. The Department of Defense has told Members of Congress that the 21 helicopters in the initial purchase, worth $375 million, are essential to maintaining the U.S. timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, but they’ve been secretive about the need for the additional $550 million in helicopters and spare parts that they plan on procuring.   That contract extension could be underway now.

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Beyond all the strange and often disturbing news coming out of Egypt, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that Egypt’s second-ever contested presidential election will take place three weeks from now on May 23 and 24, with the possibility of a run-off on June 16 – 17. This is a big deal for Egypt and the Middle East.  It is also a moment of opportunity for the United States to put into practice a policy of supporting human rights and democracy.

Without overstating the powers of an election to address the myriad problems facing Egypt’s new government, it is nonetheless a good thing that for the first time in decades Egypt seems likely to have a president and a parliament with some degree of a popular mandate.

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Chen Guangcheng is one of many human rights defenders in China who have been tortured, detained, and harassed by the government. Despite an already dire human rights situation the country, Chinese human rights defenders have become increasingly vulnerable over the past year and a half. The Chinese government has increased its crackdown against its dissidents to prevent the wave of democracy movements that swept Arab countries from spreading into its borders.

In 2011, at least 200 people, including many lawyers “disappeared,” and this year, the government is increasing its use of unofficial detention centers–so-called “black jails”–to hold dissidents. The country has also sentenced several prominent activists to lengthy prison terms. “There’s been a significant crackdown on dissension, political discussion, even the rights and the activities of lawyers who advocate on behalf of people who have been poisoned from tainted food and medicines,” U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke said earlier this year.

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Cross-posted from Huffington Post

When even the former chief prosecutor opposes a trial in the military commissions he headed, there’s something seriously wrong.

Since their creation, the Guantanamo Bay military commissions have been a political football, with Bush and then Obama Administration officials supporting their use, conservatives in Congress insisting they be used to try all suspected terrorists, and a range of Democratic lawmakers and legal and military experts criticizing them as a substandard system of justice.

With the arraignment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators scheduled for a Guantanamo military commission this weekend, the “trial of the century” has brought this exceptionally politicized contest to the fore.

On Saturday, the alleged plotters of the September 11 terrorist attacks will finally have their official day in court – more than ten years after the crimes were committed. (Proceedings begun four years ago in the military commissions by the Bush Administration were suspended after President Obama took office.) If for some families of the 9/11 victims the trial’s commencement will finally afford some relief, for other Americans, the event is primarily an embarrassment.

As former chief Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis wrote in Salon this week:

A military commission may be a justice-themed theatrical production – complete with a script, actors, a sound stage and costumes that create a passable courtroom-like atmosphere – but beneath that facade is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ charade where, as the government admits, even if a KSM or a [Abd al-Rahim al]-Nashiri is found not guilty he returns to a cell to continue serving what is likely a life sentence. That should not inspire anyone to wave the flag and shout USA! USA! in celebration of our vaunted exceptionalism.

For KSM & Co., the trial may be viewed as a vindication of sorts. Self-proclaimed jihadist warriors eager to bring death and destruction to America, the decision to keep them hidden in Guantanamo Bay for military trials sanctions that status, confirming that we have indeed been terrorized – a decade later, still too afraid to try five chained men in the heavily fortified New York federal courthouse less than a mile from the scene of the crime.

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New claims made by former Torturer-in-Chief Jose Rodriguez are meant to excuse the inexcusable: torture is counterproductive, illegal, and should not be tolerated. Here’s a rundown on where Rodriguez got it wrong on torture (pdf here).

Rodriguez Claim:
“I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques, approved by the highest levels of the U.S. government, certified as legal by the Department of Justice, and briefed to and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees, shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Usama bin Ladin.”

The Truth:

• Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin: ”We are disappointed that Mr. Rodriguez and others, who left government positions prior to the UBL operation and are not privy to all of the intelligence that led to the raid, continue to insist that the CIA’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used many years ago were a central component of our success. This view is misguided and misinformed.”
• Senator John McCain: “It was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden.”

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Get the real facts on torture at RealBookonTorture.org

Rodriguez insists that these methods were used to get information out of some of the world’s most notorious terrorists, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, whose arraignment at Guantanamo is scheduled for this Saturday.

But these assertions just don’t pass muster. One reason might be Rodriguez himself. As professional interrogator Mark Fallon points out, “Like other torture advocates, Rodriguez wasn’t a trained interrogator and lacked meaningful experience with Al Qaeda.”

Rodriguez’s claims that torture worked hinge on a flimsy premise: that KSM, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and the other so-called high-value detainees who were waterboarded and subjected to other forms of enhanced interrogation needed to be made “complicit” before their interrogations could proceed. According to Rodriguez, these detainees were not cooperative and resisted CIA interrogation when they arrived. As this story goes, after the CIA subjected them to EITs, the detainees became cooperative and started answering questions.

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Sadly, Bahrain is looking more and more like Northern Ireland of the late 1960s, when the government there refused to reform. As a result peaceful pro-democracy protestors, frustrated by the lack of progress, were tempted to react to police violence with violence of their own.

I’ve noted the similarities between Irish and Bahraini political history before.  This week reports emerged that prominent Bahraini human rights defender and political prisoner Abdulhadi Al Khawaja is being force-fed after almost three months on a hunger strike.  (In 1917 the British authorities made a terrible mistake by force feeding an Irish political prisoner, Thomas Ashe, killing him in the process and triggering a fresh wave of recruits into the revolutionary movement.)

Last year, Al Khawaja was sentenced to life in prison after being arrested, tortured and given an unfair trial in a military court after he took part in the pro-democracy protest. He is best known internationally for his human rights activism (including as a staff member for Front Line Defenders, a human rights NGO based in Dublin).  On Sunday, after a week of rumors that he had died, the authorities allowed his family to visit him.  His daughter Maryam tweeted that “he had been drugged, tied to the bed, forcibly fed with a nasoenteric tube.” A nasoentric tube is one that is pushed up through the nose and into the stomach. It was the use of a nasoenteric tube that killed Thomas Ashe.  The Bahrain authorities deny feeding Abdulhadi against his will, although the BBC reported yesterday that Abdulhadi told them he had been force-fed.

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