Dear Friends,

If you received an email today from me asking for money, please be aware that I have not sent that email. I would never send such a request!

We are still trying to figure out how this had happened, but in the meantime, please DO NOT take that email seriously.

Thank you for your understanding!
Jack

Posted by Jack Healey

in The Huffington Post

Back in the late 1970′s, many governments in Latin America waged coordinated campaigns of major criminality within their respective borders and against their own citizens. People would just go missing and their government was responsible. Families were left with a hole where their father, mother, brother or sister had once been and there was no means of filling that hole. The human rights movement gave this phenomenon a name… “disappearance.” Naming this phenomenon helped human rights organizations mobilize against this evil practice. It gave this human rights abuse a face, a title, a handle and a short way to explain this government sponsored criminality.

Today, my sense is that we need another name for a phenomenon growing in our own government here in the United States. It is criminal as well. Since the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. government has tortured people captured in the course of the war on terrorism. It’s always called something else, like “enhanced interrogation;” but, make no mistake, it is torture. Obama has said that the U.S. government does not torture, but substantial evidence refutes this assertion. There are government memos detailing the allowable physical and psychological abuse that can be inflicted upon people held prisoner by U.S. forces. There is the testimony of those held in places like Guantanamo Bay and Bagram, and later released by the U.S. military. And then there are those horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners held at the Iraqi prison in Abu Ghraib.  The Obama administration is not interested in pursuing either the lawyers who actually approved of torture and wrote memos in support of it or the doctors who participated in monitoring the effects and prolonging the torture of detainees. This is very unlike the formerly repressive regimes in Chile, Argentina and Peru, where government abuses were investigated by succeeding administrations and human rights abusers were prosecuted.

People forget that, in Nazi Germany, the first two classes of professionals who went over to support Hitler were the doctors and lawyers. It is the same now for this new phenomenon. Before 9/11, the American government hated torture, enacted laws against it and pressured other governments to prevent it. The United States would cut off international aid to “human rights abusing nations.” We were the angels of democracy and condemned the devils of torture. No longer. Not after 9/11, when lawyers acting under the authority of the United States military effort decided that they could redefine torture. One of these lawyers ended up as a professor and the other is… hold on, a U.S. federal judge. Members of the medical profession, too, are guilty of enabling the U.S. military by offering questionable medical opinions regarding what type of treatment a prisoner can endure and then monitoring the abuse during the course of interrogations.

Somehow, the U.S. government would have the world believe that it knows who the bad guys are, even without any discernible due process. And so it only hurts those detainees who have already hurt us or could hurt us in the future. Few American soldiers went to jail after being photographed torturing prisoners in their custody. No generals were held accountable; no CIA agents; no Blackwater contractors. General Petraeus knows this and has spoken to the issue. More troubling, there is a double standard which hurts U.S. military efforts. The fact is that the generals and enlisted troops know that they can go to jail if they have been found to have mistreated prisoners, but military contractors performing the same function are more likely to avoid prosecution.

I propose using the word “shadows” to represent all of the people held without bail, judge and lawyer. “Enemy combatants” is the new word because the U.S. military would like to avoid using more traditional terms that suggest detainees have rights, even while in custody. The term is a sanitized form designed to suggest that the people in custody are somehow already guilty of acts against the United States. The United States should conform to some standard of transparency and publish the names of those held in its custody. The world’s greatest democracy should not be in the business of spiriting people out of sight and outside of a legal system with built-in safeguards. The United States should not create shadows while it pursues its security objectives.

If, in fact, American legal power can create a class of people who cannot avail themselves of the protections of an impartial judge and an attorney to represent them, then the United States will be stripped of its righteousness and be reduced to a military force in the world that operates off of old standards and old military habits. We will thus strip the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of their majesty and turn the U.S. into the policemen of the world, on every corner of the earth, mighty but not moral.

Posted by Jack Healey

in The Huffington Post

For those of us Americans who oppose torture, including the use of water-boarding during the interrogation of detainees, it is a national priority to address the past human rights abuses committed by U.S. military personnel and military contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan and the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. If the present system inherited from the Bush administration continues, there should be criminal convictions of military personnel for human rights abuses committed during the course of the “war on terror.” However, Congress seems to be in no mood to chase U.S. military operatives who have committed human rights abuses. Nor does the White House seem inclined to investigate, let alone prosecute, human rights abuses. Hopefully, the Supreme Court might be found to be a haven for rights. Just maybe. So, realistically then, aside from our appropriate rage and continuing protest, what can be done to reform how we protect our national interests while upholding human rights standards?

Our military people believe that the present system of detaining and interrogating people suspected of being connected to terrorism allows for C.I.A. and Blackwater types to enjoy relative immunity while the average soldier runs a risk of going to jail for following orders. Thus, in cases where someone with good information is picked up and he or she needs to be interrogated properly and efficiently, we have a split in American military operations at a critical time. The prisoner, it is assumed, has real information which would save lives and help our soldiers avoid bodily harm. How best to get this information is the question. Who is responsible for that work? How can the United States operate so that the rules of warfare are not violated? And how can the United States credibly assert that it is not torturing detainees? The average soldier is not likely to know the rules and appropriate procedures for interrogating detainees. The C.I.A. and Blackwater types are not to be trusted without oversight and enforceable guidelines. A clear-cut process is needed.

My answer is a new kind of ‘SWAT’ team (Stop Water-boarding and Torture) for the military. I believe that a fundamental and structural change in the military is required to ensure that some degree of transparency and accountability is maintained for the treatment of detainees. The military should set up the SWAT school (unlike the School of the Americas which has taught torture methods) in order to teach military and C.I.A. personnel how to best get information and data from a prisoner while conforming to international human rights standards. The use of military contractors for interrogation of detainees should be banned outright, unless they are made to conform to the same standards as that of our enlisted personnel.

The SWAT school will work to develop efficient methods for training people to achieve the goal of getting information that will help prevent terrorist activity and/or bodily harm while keeping in mind human rights standards. Presently, this task is left to the darker side of our intelligence agencies or to some untrained soldier. Because of their lack of training or the lack of accountability, a person charged with interrogating a detainee can resort to the use of violence. Because interrogators are under pressure from their superiors to deliver good information, they can feel compelled to use whatever means necessary to extract information from those in their custody. When an interrogator cannot deliver, he/she may think that torture is the means to get what they feel they need to relax the pressure from a commanding officer. Furthermore, battle field conditions sometimes do not allow for the luxury of time to obtain information from a prisoner. So the closest soldier gets the nod to do the dirty work. He or she knows that, in their case, if they violate the rules, prosecution can result. If left to the darker side of our intelligence agencies, there is little threat of prosecution and so operatives can torture detainees with impunity.

What is needed is a training center unit that can develop people for deployment wherever the U.S. military is engaged in combat and the capture of prisoners. The established center would set appropriate standards with input from Congress and the White House. With clear standards for human rights protection in place, prosecutions would result without question in a case where human rights are violated during the course of an interrogation. Once this “SWAT school” is fully implemented into the operations of the military, the world might believe the U.S.A. when it says it is not torturing people in its custody. It would restore the balance between protecting our national interests and maintaining human rights standards for individuals.

President Obama got lucky; he won the Nobel Peace Prize a little early. Good on him. The award which is given on December 10 Human Rights Day in Oslo, Norway, of this year. The date is a remembrance of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in Paris, France in 1948. This award ceremony honoring our president will be watched like an Oscar audience all over the world.

For those of us who voted for Obama, we hope he will not merit the treatment the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has suffered. Little known to most people, the UDHR has been read by less than 5% of the world. Governments neglect it and abuse it on a regular basis. They surely do not publish it, though that was mandated by the actual documents. Forgotten and neglected, the Nobel Award is the single annual event that honors the UDHR. Even Amnesty International until 1993 did not adopt all 30 articles of the UDHR. Most human groups seldom use it. Those collective rights bother the West and many human rights groups. There is a great love of individual rights in the West but little time for collective rights, though they live and breathe in the same UDHR as do the individuals rights. i.e. The lack of respect from Wall St regarding the common good has brought down the USA economy to near collapse. The common good in the UDHR is clear and straight forward.

After all, most human rights monies are raised and spent in the West. The left side of the UDHR has suffered from the lack of the strength, money and power of the constituency in the non-West. Not many large offices or big salaries in human rights groups outside of New York, London, Geneva and Washington.

A reading of  ‘Heartbeat and a Guitar’ by Antonio D’Ambrosio tells us the heartache and glory of Johnny Cash who use his music to remember moments of national embarrassment of slavery and land stealing away from the Native people. Awards like songs can become heavy burdens. For if one absorbs the agony of the Apache and the Cherokee, if we remember the ‘strange fruit’ of slavery, a musician changes as does the listener. Johnny Cash sang them all into musical history. Like Cash, the President is a student of history. Obama knows that December 10 is about the stories of the other Peace Prize winners; the struggle of Christians in Ireland, the loss of so many Cambodians, six million Jews, apartheid’s lasting for so long until Tutu and Mandela, the disastrous war of Vietnam for us and them, the massive human rights abuses of military regimes like Argentina, Chile, Burma, especially raping of women as a state policy….all these times and events lived and live in the souls of the Peace Prize winners. By osmosis, Obama will inherit them as well. They are a burden to bear. Surely, sad lessons to learn, but must be learned to avoid repetition.

Our young President will get a little older. The Prize wants him to become wiser as well. The chasm between rich and poor; the chasm between Islam and the other faiths; the chasm between a nation empire in  support of wars as opposed to a nation state in support of peace will emerge; ecology beloved or damned….these chasms and more will surface in the ceremony. Obama will be handed the greatest prize in the world……on the day the greatest document ever written for all of us on earth was signed. My question is simple….will our president accept the prize with the document? Or like former American presidents and award winners, he will take one without the other. Hope not.

The poor everywhere deserve nothing less.

The world will await Obama’s acceptance speech.  With the Peace Prize in his hand, I hope he gives the best speech he has ever given using the frame work of all 30, yes, articles of the UDHR. After 62 years, the real prize is the UDHR and what Obama will do about it.

After all, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin L King, Jr. used a document, namely the Constitution, to move this country forward. Maybe, this President will move our world forward using a document as well. The UDHR. The dream worked. Now for the hope.

Posted by Jack Healey

in The Huffington Post

In the early 1990s, at the Vienna Human Rights Conference, the Chinese government would not allow the Dalai Lama to enter the building and attend the on-going conference. Now in 2009, President Obama just did the exact same thing by refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama during his visit to Washington, DC. In Vienna, it was more understandable because China forbade it as they sat in the conference as a key player inside the United Nations. The President leads a free nation.

My reaction to the exclusion of the Dalai Lama from the Vienna Human Rights Conference was to carry out a blockade of the conference building entrance as an act of civil disobedience. The New York Times carried a picture of that demonstration. If I could find a venue to organize a similar demonstration of Obama’s refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama this time, I would.

Let me say why.

The Dalai Lama represents the Tibetan people better than most governmental leaders represent theirs. Like Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, another popular leader kept out of power by her government and again backed by the Chinese. Why is it that he (or she) should suffer these kinds of slights? Should not the Nobel Peace Prize winners have anything to say about this? Is it not correct and proper that the winners of such prestigious awards be able to convene and talk about the state of peace in the world?

China is the answer. China is big. Big in dollars. Big in customers. Big in our national debt. Big in supplying guns, to Burma which itself oppresses its people with a serious determination. Big in human rights abuses. China often sends fearsome messages, in the form of military exercises and threatening diplomacy, to Taiwan. China is big in land and environmental abuse. China is big in labor abuses. Many corporations for fear of China will not do a certain kind of charity(funding of human rights groups for example) . Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State goes to China and goes easy on their human rights abuses. She was stronger when she spoke at a human rights event in China when she was the First Lady. We human groups are told that she is after a better economic relationship with China and that she needs to go easy. The President follows suit by avoiding the Dalai Lama. The administration is coordinated when it needs dissidence.

Our President, skilled in politics, terribly bright and a former community organizer, is afraid of being seen in public shaking the hand of the Dalai Lama. This is especially ironic in light of Obama receiving this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. There are vague promises that Obama can meet with the Dalai Lama later. If later, then why not now? One Nobel winner should be able to meet another Nobel winner without fear. Did not one of the President Roosevelt speak of the freedom from fear as a necessary ingredient for life in a democracy?

Thus, given this kind of timidity, hard questions need to be asked. Can President Obama ask the President of China if the Dalai Lama would be allowed back into Tibet? Take up his old residence? Calm his people? Walk familiar Lhasa streets now that he is in his older years? Hang out with his followers? Pray in monasteries that he knows? Dalai is old and it would be an appropriate gesture by both heads of state.

Tibet is the Dalai Lama’s “Vatican.” He is non-violent, unlike the Chinese government. Publicly acknowledging the Dalai Lama’s cause would be type of change I hoped to see when I gave money to Obama’s campaign. Can we advocate that the Dalai Lama be able to return to his home and join his people? Is this too radical?

Better yet, maybe the Dalai Lama ought to do what Gandhi did …march, not to the sea, but to the mountains. His mountains, Tibet. Maybe. Maybe not. But then, nothing comes from fear, not for the President, not for the Dalai Lama and not for the Chinese — it is time for the light.