Muslims For Kucinich

Kucinich gave the following speech in Congress on December 15, 2005:

Shortly before 10 p.m. Congressman Ike Skelton (D-MO) offered a motion instructing House conferees on H.R. 1815, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006, to "support the Senate provision requiring a classified report on alleged clandestine detention facilities for individuals captured in the global war on terrorism."

An hour into the debate, Congressman Kucinich asked:

"Mr. Speaker, I would ask my friend [Mr. Skelton] if he would yield to a question, because I am looking here at the motion that he has, and it basically refers to the majority's bill and instructs them, according to their bill, and it is within our jurisdiction to do that. And it gives them the jurisdiction to follow up, does it not?"

Mr. Skelton: "If the gentleman will yield, yes, this part of the Senate bill became part thereof as a result of the majority chairman of their Senate committee."

Supporting the Skelton motion, Congressman Kucinich continued:

"Taking back my time, Mr. Speaker, you see, we have a right as a Nation to defend ourselves, but we do not have any right to shred the Constitution or to nullify the role that Congress has as a coequal branch of government or to nullify the right we have to give motions to instruct. We have an absolute right to do that.

"Now, this all goes back to 9/11, where all the fear has been created; and we have people now more concerned about leaks and more concerned about open discussion exposing secret prisons than they are in exposing those prisons. People want to deny congressional oversight and deny the power of coequality.

"I mean, the facts are that there is a real body of evidence suggesting that secret prisons do exist; that there has been rendition; that people have been basically taken off the streets, moved to countries that use torture, and violations of human rights. I mean, what is happening to our country?

"Let us look at our Constitution. We have habeas corpus, people have a right to be told what crime they have committed, they have a right to an attorney and to a fair and speedy trial. Now, why do we have those things? Because in America we stand for something.

"So we are, in effect, permitting the shredding of our Constitution. The violation of international law. What has become of our Nation when we do not challenge that or at least have the opportunity to support Mr. Skelton's motion to instruct, which is our right to do, to go along with what has already been approved in the Senate, and to say, look, we think that there ought to be a role for the Director of National Intelligence to give a report to the Intelligence Committee setting forth the nature and cost and otherwise providing a full accounting on any clandestine prison or detention facility currently or formerly operated by the United States Government regardless of location.

"Look, let us remember what we stand for as a Nation. We are losing sight of that here. We are becoming something that could be called in another era un-American. Let us stand for our American values here and support the Skelton motion.

"Mr. Speaker, I wish to insert for the Record the following articles relating to my comments:"

U.S. Running "Archipelago" of Secret Prisons: Amnesty International
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
From the Free Republic, June 6, 2005

U.S. Running "Archipelago" of Secret Prisons: Amnesty International

Washington. -- The U.S. government is operating an "archipelago" of prisons around the world, many of them secret camps into which people are being "literally disappeared," a top Amnesty International official said Sunday.

Amnesty International executive director William Schulz criticized the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush for holding alleged battlefield combatants in "indefinite incommunicado detention" without access to lawyers in an interview with Fox News Sunday.

Schulz was pressed to substantiate Amnesty's claim in a May 25 report that the U.S. prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba naval base -- where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are being held indefinitely -- represents the "gulag of our times."

The gulag claim, referring to the notorious prison camp system of the Soviet Union, has drawn withering criticism from the U.S. president, who called it "absurd." Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have also slammed the rights group's claim.

Russian 1970 Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet prison camp system in his best-selling book "The Gulag Archipelago."

Schulz said the gulag reference was not "an exact or a literal analogy."

"But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared -- held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers," Schulz told Fox.

Asked how AI could compare the detentions of millions of Soviet citizens in the gulag system to purported anti-U.S. combatants captured on the battlefield, Schulz said some of those held in Guantanamo "happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. "

"We do know that at least some of the 200 some prisoners who have been released from Guantanamo Bay have made pretty persuasive cases that they were imprisoned there, not because they were involved in military conflict but simply because they were enemies of the Northern Alliance," he said.

Schulz called for an official probe into the alleged rights abuses at U.S. detention centers around the globe.

Amnesty refers in the May 25 report to Rumsfeld and U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as alleged "torture architects."

The United States "should be the one that should investigate those who are alleged at least to be architects of torture, not just the foot soldiers who may have inflicted the torture directly, but those who authorized it or encouraged it or provided rationales for it," Schulz said.

According to Amnesty, Rumsfeld provided "the exact rules, 27 of them in fact, for interrogations, some of which do constitute torture or cruel, inhumane treatment," Schulz said.

The Guantanamo Bay camp and U.S. detention practices have been the subject of renewed debate in recent weeks, sparked by a Newsweek magazine report -- since retracted -- that Guantanamo interrogators flushed a Koran in a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners.

Amnesty is not the only rights group to have called on Washington to investigate alleged abuses at the camp -- Schulz pointed to released FBI documents that also raised concerns about Guantanamo interrogations.

U.S. officials insist such concerns are unfounded, and that the "war on terror" detainees are treated as humanely as possible.

U.S. soldiers have been tried and punished for abusing detainees -- notably at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where at least one captive died -- but U.S. officials say those are isolated incidents.

The furor sparked by Amnesty's claims shows no signs of abating.

The New York Times said Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed down, saying it had become "a national shame" and a "propaganda gift to America's enemies."

"What makes Amnesty's gulag metaphor apt is that Guantanamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other, secret locations run by the intelligence agencies," the Times said.

The Washington Post, whose editorial page has been more critical of Amnesty's gulag claim, reported Sunday -- citing Schulz -- that Amnesty's donations have quintupled and new memberships have doubled in the past week since it released its report. (Wire reports)

From the Washington Post, Wed. Nov. 2, 2005

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

By Dana Priest

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?'"