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Ignoring U.S. Destabilization of Libya, GOP Benghazi Hearing Asks Clinton All the Wrong Questions
Former secretary of state and current Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton underwent a marathon day of testimony Thursday before the House Select Committee probing the 2012 attack in Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Throughout the hearing, Clinton defended her record on Benghazi in the face of Republican criticism. Republicans say Clinton ignored pre-attack warnings and mishandled its aftermath, even though seven previous congressional probes have found no wrongdoing. Clinton handled Republican questions with a calm demeanor, and afterward panel chair Trey Gowdy, Republican congressmember of South Carolina, admitted the hearing failed to turn up anything new. Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, says the Benghazi hearing has ignored the real issue for Clinton to address: the U.S. bombing of Libya that destabilized the country and set the stage for the fatal 2012 attack. "What was learned was irrelevant," Goodman says. "What was relevant wasn’t discussed."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Former secretary of state, current Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton spent more than eight hours Thursday testifying before the House Select Committee probing the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Throughout the hearing, Clinton defended her record as secretary of state on Benghazi in the face of Republican criticism.
HILLARY CLINTON: You know, I would imagine I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been racking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done. And so, when I took responsibility, I took it as a challenge and an obligation to make sure, before I left the State Department, that what we could learn—as I’m sure my predecessors did after Beirut and after Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and after all of the other attacks on our facilities—I’m sure all of them, Republican and Democrat alike, especially where there was loss of American life, said, "OK, what must we do better?"
AMY GOODMAN: The panel was the eighth such committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks, and the hearings largely covered much of the same ground as previous proceedings. Clinton supporters have criticized the Republican-led effort as an attempt to damage the Democratic front-runner’s presidential campaign. In his opening statement, committee chair Republican Trey Gowdy addressed those charges.
REP. TREY GOWDY: Madam Secretary, I understand there are people, frankly, in both parties, who have suggested that this investigation is about you. Let me assure you it is not, and let me assure you why it is not. This investigation is about four people who were killed representing our country on foreign soil.
AMY GOODMAN: Elijah Cummings and other Democrats pushed back on Gowdy’s assertion, casting the continued investigation as politically motivated. Referencing an interview Gowdy did Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Cummings said Gowdy wasn’t being truthful when he said he had zero interest in investigating the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s emails other than for evaluating them for information. Gowdy and Cummings then had this tense exchange.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: You issued a subpoena to Sidney Blumenthal on May 19th, 2015, compelling him to appear for a deposition June 16, 2015. You issued this subpoena unilaterally, without giving the Select Committee members the opportunity to debate or vote on it. You sent two armed marshals to serve the subpoena on Mr. Blumenthal’s wife at their home without having ever sent him a request to participate voluntarily, which he would have done. Then, Mr. Chairman, you personally attended Mr. Blumenthal’s deposition. You personally asked him about the Clinton Foundation, and you personally directed your staff to ask questions about the Clinton Foundation, which they did more than 50 times. Now, these facts directly contradict the statements you made on national television—
REP. TREY GOWDY: No, that’s not—
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: —this past Sunday.
REP. TREY GOWDY: No, sir. With all due respect, they do not. We’re—we just heard email after email after email about Libya and Benghazi that Sidney Blumenthal sent to the secretary of state. I don’t care if he sent it by Morse code, carrier pigeon, smoke signals. The fact that he happened to send it by email is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he was sending information to the secretary of state. That is what’s relevant. Now, with respect to the subpoena, if he had bothered to answer the telephone calls of our committee, he wouldn’t have needed a subpoena.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Well, would the gentleman yield?
REP. TREY GOWDY: I’ll be happy to, but you need to make sure the entire record is correct, Mr. Cummings.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Yeah, and that’s exactly what I want to do.
REP. TREY GOWDY: Well, then go ahead.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: I’m about to tell you. I move that we put into the record the entire transcript of Sidney Blumenthal. If we’re going to release the emails, let’s do the transcript. That way the world can see it.
AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration has been criticized for its handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack. The White House initially said the consulate was attacked by protesters denouncing a short American film insulting the Prophet Muhammad. But it later turned out the attack was carried out by well-armed militants. The militants first attacked the diplomatic mission, then a secret CIA annex. Republicans say Clinton ignored pre-attack warnings and mishandled its aftermath. While previous reports have been scathing over security failures and have led to firings at the State Department, none have accused Clinton or other top officials of wrongdoing.
Well, joining us for more is Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center’s National Security Project. His latest book, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mel Goodman. Can you start off by talking about the significance of the hearing yesterday, what was learned, what wasn’t learned, and what you think are the key questions to be asked that may have never been asked formally by any of these committees?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Thank you, Amy. What was learned was irrelevant. What was relevant wasn’t discussed. And it was those areas that concern me. Why was the CIA operating a base out of Benghazi? Why was the State Department operating a transitional mission facility, a TMF—it wasn’t a consulate—in Benghazi? Why was Ambassador Stevens, who was aware of the security situation, in Benghazi in the first place? So, none of these questions have been asked.
And remember, when the plane flew these survivors out of Benghazi to get them back to Tripoli, for every State Department official on that plane, there were five or six CIA employees. And my sources tell me that the CIA was there to buy back weapons that we had given to Gaddafi in the first place. So the question all of this begs—and this is where Hillary Clinton’s remarks did concern me—is that we created a disaster in Libya. It was the decision to conduct regime change, the decision to go after Gaddafi, which eventually led to his death. And remember, Hillary Clinton welcomed that news with the words "We came, we saw, he died."
Now, there is a link to what Putin is doing in Syria, because, remember, we had to tell the Russians that we had very limited objectives, a very limited mission in Benghazi, so that they would not veto the U.N. resolution. And then, essentially, Putin finds out that our mission really was to go after Gaddafi, creating this instability, this discontinuity, this chaos in Libya.
So what really needs to be discussed is, what is the role of military power in the making of foreign policy? Why does Hillary Clinton think that Libya is not a disaster? And why was Hillary Clinton pushing for the military role in Libya in the first place? These are important issues.
As far as the hearings were concerned, she testified off and on for nearly 11 hours. She handled herself extremely well, and she essentially exposed the fact that these were a group of Republican troglodytes doing their best to marginalize her and humiliate her. And they totally failed.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, the justification at the time, that Gaddafi was going to commit a massacre in Benghazi. Can you take us back to—again, it was September 11th—another September 11th—2012. I think there is so little talked about, about what actually was happening there, that people don’t realize exactly what the context was.
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, in the wake of Gaddafi’s death, there was total chaos in Libya. And essentially, there was a civil war being waged between forces in the western part of the country, based around the capital, Tripoli, and forces in the eastern part of the country, based around Benghazi. And what we have learned, essentially, over the last 34 years of foreign policymaking, that when you use military power in areas that are not stable, you usually create a worse situation. Israel invades Lebanon in 1982, and the creation of Hezbollah takes place. We arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and this leads to groups like the Haqqani faction, the Hekmatyar group, and even al-Qaeda. We go into Iraq, there’s the Sunni Awakening. Now we’re dealing with the Islamic State. So we took a very bad situation, where there was factionalism in Libya, and made it much worse by removing the only person who seemed to hold it together, even though he did it with incredible violence and threat, but Gaddafi was holding that nation, to the extent it was a nation, holding it together. So, we were a major force and a major reason for the instability that took place. We should never have been in Benghazi. All of the other international institutions, both government and nongovernment, had pulled out of Benghazi.
So, what we need to know is why Stevens was there in the first place, what the CIA was doing, and why there was no—virtually no security around the diplomatic facility, which was just a transitional facility, and because it was a TMF, it wasn’t even eligible for an upgrade in security. It didn’t come up on the radar screen. And to blame her for that is ridiculous. But to know what her position was on why military force was a good idea is important, particularly since she is going to be the Democratic candidate—she established that last week in the debate. And there’s a very good chance she’ll be occupying the White House for four to eight years in the near term.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re speaking to Mel Goodman, who is a former CIA and State Department analyst, about the questions, the key questions, about U.S. presence in Libya, to begin with. The real lessons we can learn about what took place on September 11, 2012, don’t start and end on that day. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "History Repeating," The Propellerheads, featuring the legendary Shirley Bassey, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. In 2012, then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, spoke at a House committee hearing a month after the attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi. He stated, quote, "The security situation did not happen overnight because of a decision made by someone [at] the State Department." He went on to criticize U.S. policy in Libya.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: We owe it to the diplomatic corps, who serves our nation, to start at the beginning. And that’s what I shall do. The security threats in Libya, including the unchecked extremist groups who are armed to the teeth, exist because our nation spurred on a civil war, destroying the security and stability of Libya. And, you know, no one defends Gaddafi. Libya was not in a meltdown before the war. In 2003, Gaddafi reconciled with the community of nations by giving up his nation’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. At the time, President Bush said Gaddafi’s actions made our country and our world safer.
Now, during the Arab Spring, uprisings across the Middle East occurred, and Gaddafi made ludicrous threats against Benghazi. Based on those verbal threats, we intervened—absent constitutional authority, I might add. We bombed Libya. We destroyed their army. We obliterated their police stations. Lacking any civil authority, armed brigades control security. Al-Qaeda expanded its presence. Weapons are everywhere. Thousands of shoulder-to-air missiles are on the loose. Our military intervention led to greater instability in Libya.
Many of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, made that argument to try to stop the war. It’s not surprising, given the inflated threat and the grandiose expectations inherent in our nation building in Libya, that the State Department was not able to adequately protect our diplomats from this predictable threat. It’s not surprising, and it’s also not acceptable. ...
We want to stop the attacks on our embassies? Let’s stop trying to overthrow governments. This should not be a partisan issue. Let’s avoid the hype. Let’s look at the real situation here. Interventions do not make us safer. They do not protect our nations They are themselves a threat to America.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ohio congressman, former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich testifying in 2012. This week is the fourth anniversary of the death of Muammar Gaddafi. He died close to a year before the Benghazi attack. Our guest is Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center’s National Security Project. Can you follow up on what Kucinich is saying and what you think are the critical lessons today that we have or have not learned, Mel Goodman?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think Kucinich was spot-on. And I would go back to 2003. When we invaded Iraq—under false pretenses, because it was a total corruption of the intelligence process—remember that Gaddafi had been in power for about three decades. Mubarak had been in power for about two or three decades. Libya was stable, Egypt was stable. Saddam Hussein had been in power for several decades, and there was a certain stability in Iraq. The important thing is, these countries were not national security problems for the United States.
Then we use military power in a totally unacceptable fashion in Iraq, and this created the current situation that we’re dealing with, in which you have total instability in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq. We now have a power we need to deal with: Iran—and I give high praise to John Kerry for the nuclear agreement with Iran, but we helped to make Iran such an important player by going to war in Afghanistan in an extended fashion, which removed Iran’s enemy on the east, and then going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, Iran’s enemy on the west. So we’ve been the source of tremendous instability. In many ways, I think, if you look at the Middle East—and there’s an apocalyptic character to what we’re seeing in the Middle East—we are the major independent variable. And we do that because we use force.
And this belief in regime change—and sadly enough, it goes back to President Eisenhower in 1953, when we used American power in collusion, conspiratorial collusion, with the British, Operation Ajax, to overthrow the only real democratically elected government Iran has ever had. And, of course, Kennedy followed this up in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs, which the CIA IG called a "perfect failure." Then you jump forward or leap forward to Chile, again a democratically elected government, but it was socialist, so Nixon and Kissinger target that. Go to Reagan and Iran-contra.
So if you look at American history, you have the United States essentially trying to create an empire with a base structure that involves over 800 facilities all over the world. There’s no country that has more than a half-dozen facilities. And Britain and France can claim that in former colonial areas. Russia can claim a few facilities in former Soviet republics, plus Tartus in Syria. But it’s the United States that has this huge facility, a forward strategy to project power in order to destabilize situations when it becomes convenient for United States’ interest.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman—
MELVIN GOODMAN: And this is essentially wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: I daresay the Obama administration would say they intervened in Libya to prevent Gaddafi—this is before 2012—committing a massacre of the Libyan uprising, in the same way that they would say they have intervened in Syria for the same reason, to prevent Assad from killing his own people. Your response to both? And what would have been a peaceful alternative?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, in the case of Libya, I think there could be an alternative, because Gaddafi had negotiated with the United States in the past. In fact, the reference to Gaddafi giving up his nuclear weapons is extremely important, because that was done in very delicate, private negotiations. And the CIA played a major role in that, even though that’s not well known.
So, the essential element is that we should realize that the use of military power should always be the last resort, and, frankly, I think President Obama does understand that. I don’t think he’s been comfortable with the expansion of power. When the so-called surge happened in Afghanistan in 2009 and he went to West Point to give the important speech that he gave, he made it clear that he was putting the troops in, but it was temporary. In 18 months, he was going to start taking them out. And he knew he needed to get troops out of Iraq. He wanted to get all the troops out of Afghanistan. He led from behind, according to his aides, in Libya, so that was somewhat halfhearted. But the fact is, we used military power in these places, and now they’re less stable than they were before.
And to talk about nation building is particularly silly. We can’t rebuild Baltimore, so what are we going to do in Aleppo and Mosul and Benghazi and Tripoli? We have to be more balanced and more restrained with our use of power. And Hillary Clinton should have been forced to discuss that yesterday, but I don’t think that panel was interested in American national security. These were a bunch of "gotcha" questions that got this country nowhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, you’re a former CIA and State Department analyst. Let’s talk about the role of the CIA, for example, in Libya. The CIA and the State Department, are they merging? And does that endanger diplomacy, when people in other countries think it’s the same thing?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, the problem, I think, is even greater than that. The merger that’s taking place, particularly under this director, John Brennan, is the merger between the CIA and the Pentagon. I left the CIA in the 1980s because of the politicization of intelligence under Bill Casey and Bob Gates. But what John Brennan has done is created the CIA as a paramilitary institution that is really doing the bidding of the Pentagon. He said in his confirmation hearings he was going to give up drone warfare, that that properly belonged in the Pentagon—if we should be doing it at all, which is another question. But not only has he not done that, we’ve expanded the use of the drones. Now he’s merging intelligence analysts and operatives, which will further politicize intelligence.
So what I worry about is the CIA that was created by Harry Truman to challenge the Pentagon, to challenge intelligence briefings by the Pentagon, to try to get an understanding of why we need arms control and disarmament—and there, the CIA and the State Department, and when we had an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which Bill Clinton got rid of, the CIA did some very good work. But if you look at the last 10 years, if you look at politicized intelligence, the phony case to go to war, people like Mike Morell, a deputy director, who was called the "Bob Gates of his generation" by Politico, and we certainly know what that means—the politicization of all the intelligence to invade Iraq, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, torture and abuse. This is what needs to be addressed, but I think, frankly, President Obama has been intimidated by this process, intimidated by the very military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
AMY GOODMAN: Melvin Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us. The issues, some of them, you raise, we’re going to raise with our next guest. Melvin Goodman is former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center’s National Security Project. His latest book is National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.
Coming up, we turn to the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights to talk about the refugee crisis in Europe, the dangers of mass surveillance, as well as his call for a full probe of the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. Stay with us.... Read More →
"Everybody is a Suspect": European Rights Chief on Edward Snowden's Call for Global Privacy Treaty
Last month, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and other privacy activists launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. It would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It’s been dubbed the "Snowden Treaty." We discuss the state of mass surveillance with Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Nils Muižnieks. He is the commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe. Last month, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and other privacy activists launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. It would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It’s been dubbed the, quote, "Snowden Treaty." Snowden spoke about the need for the treaty via teleconference from Russia at the September launch.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: This is not a problem exclusive to the United States or the National Security Agency or the FBI or the Department of Justice or any agency of government anywhere. This is a global problem that affects all of us.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Edward Snowden. What do you think has to happen around mass surveillance?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Well, we have a very negative trend now in Europe, where a number of countries are moving from targeted surveillance to untargeted surveillance, and this is quite dangerous. This means that everybody is a suspect. What we need is we need strict rules on authorization of surveillance measures. We need to outlaw certain—the use of certain technologies, which catch a—which cast a very wide net and grab communications of everybody in an area, everybody communicating with a certain person who might be suspected of terrorist activities. But we need to beef up democratic oversight of security services. We need intrusive parliamentary committees. We need judicial authorization. We need—we need to be assured that the security services aren’t doing what they can, but that they are operating within the framework of the rule of law. And we need to provide remedies, effective remedies, to those who have been done wrong, who have been unjustly surveilled and had their privacy invaded.
AMY GOODMAN: Who would be the police on this?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: There are various models in Europe. But very often, to make it democratic, it has to be parliamentarian, as well. You need members of parliament engaged and keeping an eye on the executive, keeping an eye on the security services. Very often you have expert panels assisting parliaments, people who have the technical expertise to know what they’re being shown by the security services. And I think it’s completely legitimate to give money to security services, to give them technological know-how, but we need to do the same to the overseers, so that they can really see and understand what’s going on and keep an eye on it.
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Very often these overseers are rubber—they rubber-stamp requests for surveillance. They don’t really go into the meat of it. When I was—I asked in Germany, for example, the people involved with authorizing surveillance requests. They said 98 to 99 percent of all requests are granted. To me, this shows that the system is not effective.
AMY GOODMAN: Is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor, do you believe?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: I think—I will be agnostic on that question, but I think that he revealed a serious human rights issue, which until then had not been known. And some of the issue—some of the solutions that he is proposing, I think, are very much in line with what we have been advocating.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, a ceasefire agreed in the east of Ukraine—has been agreed—between the separatists and Ukrainian government forces, has been holding. But fears remain that fighting could resume. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Kiev was not upholding its end of the Ukraine peace deal.
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] It is useless to endlessly blame Russia for not fulfilling or not urging the authorities of unrecognized republics in the southeast of Ukraine to do something in fulfillment of the Minsk agreements, if the key positions of the Minsk agreements are not fulfilled by the Kiev authorities. And they are not fulfilled by the Kiev authorities.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Putin of Russia. Nils Muižnieks, you’ve been spending a lot of your time on Ukraine. What should we understand about it?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Ukraine is a human rights disaster zone. Crimea has been annexed. The human rights situation there has deteriorated very seriously in the last year. The east of the country, which is held by the rebels, supported by Russia—I was in Donetsk, in rebel-occupied Donetsk, in July. There are very serious human rights issues there, but the humanitarian situation there is also catastrophic. You have a lot of people who have been displaced. You have a lot of people who are going hungry, who don’t have access to clean water, to medicine. You have allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture. And the West needs to support Ukraine, but it also needs to hold it to account for its human rights violations, because it also has not done everything it can. And sometimes there are some—there are some military groupings which are also involved in or implicated in human rights violations.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but of course we’ll continue to follow all of these issues. Nils Muižnieks is the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights.
And that does it for our show, though this news just in: Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee has dropped out of the race for the Democratic Party nomination for president. Chafee is a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democratic former governor and senator of Rhode Island.
We have a job opening at Democracy Now! It’s development director, full-time in New York. Go to our website to find out the details at democracynow.org.... Read More →
"Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime": European Rights Chief on Refugee Crisis & "Shameful" U.S. Response
As violence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Africa pushes a wave of refugees to seek shelter in Europe, the United Nations refugee agency reports a growing number of children have been forced into sex to pay for the continuation of their journey. Now the United Nations is accusing the Czech Republic of systematic human rights violations over its treatment of refugees. The U.N. said the Czech government is committing the abuses in an effort to deter refugees from entering the country or staying there. We discuss the refugee crisis with Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As violence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Africa pushes a wave of refugees to seek shelter in Europe, the United Nations refugee agency reports a growing number of children have been forced into sex to pay for the continuation of their journey. Now the United Nations is accusing the Czech Republic of systematic human rights violations over its treatment of refugees. The U.N. said the Czech government is committing the abuses in an effort to deter refugees from entering the Czech Republic or staying there. Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, spoke Thursday in Geneva.
RUPERT COLVILLE: There appear to be violations of human rights of the migrants and refugees, not isolated violations, not coincidental, but essentially systematic. And this is basically to do with the fact that they’re being detained pretty much as a matter of course, for 40 days in some cases, which is just about permissible under Czech law, but in other cases way beyond that, so even beyond what the Czech legal system allows. They’re not being—many of them are unable to challenge their detention legally.
AMY GOODMAN: Colville went on to describe the findings of a recent report by the Czech ombudsperson, who visited migrant detention centers and was shocked by what she saw.
RUPERT COLVILLE: She described it as degrading treatment of parents in front of their children. There have been reports also—this seems to have got better, but there were reports that children were being separated from their parents, who were behind wire fences, that they were having to see their parents being handcuffed. People are being strip-searched in order to take their money, essentially, because they’re actually being charged for being detained. So they’re being wrongly detained in the first place, and then they’re having to pay for it.
AMY GOODMAN: Germany alone says it expects to take in between 800,000 and 1 million refugees this year. Sweden has already taken in over 100,000 refugees this year, including 10,000 in the past week. With winter looming, authorities across Europe are scrambling to find warm places for refugees. Refugees from Iraq and Syria are suffering in near-freezing temperatures in Croatia.
REFUGEE 1: What we saw from the bad weather, the bad weather is very cold. And the U.N. help us. The U.N. offer us blankets. They offer us food, drinks and many things. So we are very grateful to them. And we—now we just are waiting for the gate to be opened, and complete our way to Germany.
REFUGEE 2: Yeah, it was very cold. We was freezing.
REFUGEE 3: [translated] This situation is really difficult. Children are staying in the cold. People have been waiting here for the past two days. All night they sleep outside. Children are getting sick. It is enough. We are all waiting for the borders to open, so it is over.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the refugee crisis, we’re joined in studio by Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Explain why these refugees are coming, the responsibility of the Western countries they are fleeing to, and what needs to be done.
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: This is not a new crisis. Anybody who’s been following what’s going on in Syria knows that countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have been faced with huge—with a huge arrival of refugees from Syria. And the inadequacies of many national systems for asylum and refugee have been plain to anybody on the ground. Greece’s asylum system collapsed a number of years ago. Italy has been saving hundreds of thousands of people in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s only when it went further into Europe that the rest of the countries began to take notice.
The responsibility is to provide access to asylum for those who need protection, to not detain them, as we just heard—seeking asylum is not a crime, and people should not be detained for doing so—and to get fair hearing. And those who need protection should be given it. The problem is that this was very predictable that people would move, and what we need is to ramp up resettlements from the areas in and around the conflict, so that people don’t have to make these dangerous journeys, don’t have to endure the suffering. If we’re going to give them protection, why not help them move immediately to a safe place?
AMY GOODMAN: What about the United States? What’s the responsibility of the United States?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Well, the United States can do much, much more. When I hear that the United States has taken several thousand Syrians, this is shameful. This is a pitifully small number. When you hear that a country like Armenia, a very small, poor country, has received 10,000 Syrian refugees, when you hear that various countries in Europe are taking hundreds of thousands of people, to learn that America is taking several thousand from Syria, I don’t think it’s worthy of America. I think America also has a special responsibility to politically help arrive at a solution in Syria to end the conflict, because until that happens, we’re going to see a continued outflow of people.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the German politician, Horst Seehofer, the premier of the state of Bavaria, called on the U.S. and Arab states to take in more refugees.
HORST SEEHOFER: [translated] We need, ladies and gentlemen, quotas for refugees from war zones. And I would like to underline my support for the proposal from my parliamentary group. Apart from all the other measures, we need to achieve a quota for refugees from war zones. Also, ladies and gentlemen, we need to include countries in the distribution of these quotas which have an especially large responsibility for these refugees, such as the United States and the Arab countries.
AMY GOODMAN: We were just talking before about Syria and Libya and what the U.S. did in the interventions there. What is the link between those interventions, the U.S. military moving in, and refugees moving out?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Well, it’s clear that these people are fleeing terrorism, conflict, barrel bombs, beheadings. And insofar as America is politically implicated in one side or the other, militarily implicated in one side or the other, America has a special responsibility towards the people who afterwards are uprooted and flee for their lives. My job is to look at what’s going on in 47 countries, so I cannot really speak to questions of what’s going on in Libya or Syria. But we see the consequences in Europe of political and military decisions made in those countries.... Read More →
Victims of U.S. Rendition & Torture Starting to Reclaim Rights Says Council of Europe Rights Chief
More than 25 European countries cooperated with the CIA’s rendition, torture and secret prison program, and the quest for accountability continues today. "This is a sordid story that does Europe shame," says Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights. "[European countries] facilitated these human rights violations — they should be accountable before their citizens and before international law."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Nils Muižnieks, you are the commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe. You’re taking on a number of issues. I want to talk about surveillance. But first, secret prisons.
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: This is a sordid story in Europe that does Europe shame. Ten years ago, more than 25 countries cooperated with the CIA in the program of extraordinary rendition, and there’s been very little accountability until now. We know—it’s quite well documented—that there were secret prisons in Poland, in Lithuania, in Romania. And now the victims of extraordinary rendition are beginning to claim their rights through the European Court of Human Rights and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Is it fair to say "extraordinary rendition" is just a fancy term or a White House term for "kidnapping"?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: It’s kidnapping, it’s unlawful detention, and it’s torture. And it’s a lack of the rule of law and the ability of people to defend their rights in any system, in any court system, national or international.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did these countries do it? What kind of information can you get from them? What are they responsible for revealing now?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Well, they cannot—these countries cannot say this was the fault of the U.S. Of course, the U.S. is implicated, but they facilitated these human rights violations. And they are now—they should be accountable before their citizens and before international law. They have denied—denied their participation, denied knowledge, for many years. But that position is increasingly untenable, because even after—because now you have these court decisions. You have growing admissions of, "Yes, there was something there, but we didn’t know torture was going on." So, there’s still a lot of accountability. And this can only—true accountability can only take place if the U.S. cooperates with European countries.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was a victim of CIA rendition and torture. In December 2012, he won a landmark victory in European court. El-Masri was seized in Macedonia in 2003 as part of the CIA’s secret extraordinary rendition program. He was beaten, sodomized, held in a secret prison in Afghanistan for months, before being abandoned by the CIA on a hillside in Albania. El-Masri explained his ordeal through a translator.
KHALID EL-MASRI: [translated] They took me to this room, and I had handcuffs, and I had a blindfold. And when the door was closed, I was beaten from all sides. I was hit from all sides. I then was humiliated. And then I could hear just like—that I could hear that I was being photographed in the process when I was completely naked. Then my hands were tied to my back. I got a blindfold, and they put chains to my ankles and a sack over my head, and just like the pictures we have seen of Guantánamo, for example. Then I was dragged brutally into the airplane, and in the airport I was thrown to the floor. I was tied to the floor and to the sides of the airplane. At some point when I woke up again, I found myself in Afghanistan. I was brutally dragged off the airplane and put in the trunk of a car. I was thrown into the trunk of a car.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s German citizen Khalid El-Masri describing his torture and rendition by the CIA. Well, in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Macedonia’s transfer of Masri into CIA custody, ruled his treatment in U.S. custody amounted to torture. The ruling marked the first time a court of law has determined the CIA treatment of terror suspects constituted torture, and the first time a European state has been held liable for being complicit. Now, again, this was a case that even the U.S. admitted, ultimately, was a case of mistaken identity. He was a passenger on a bus. Masri attorney Darian Pavli welcomed the landmark decision.
DARIAN PAVLI: It has been nine years, and it has taken legal proceedings in three different countries, which provided no results for him. Today, this court has confirmed what we knew all along, that his story was true, that he was a victim of an offense of extraordinary rendition. And I think it’s a major victory for Europe and the cause of human rights in the world generally.
AMY GOODMAN: He was held apparently for five months largely because the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center’s al-Qaeda unit believed he was someone else, this according to a former CIA official who refused to be identified. How typical is what happened to El-Masri?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: We don’t know, because of the cloak of secrecy. But we know that there were many people who were unjustly and arbitrarily detained, tortured and transferred to Guantánamo. And some people were probably released, and we don’t know about their cases. But we have several other cases that have been adjudicated in the European Court of Human Rights—al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, who are both in Guantánamo. And Poland was found accountable. And there are several other cases pending before the European Court of Human Rights. So these are not individual cases. This is a pattern for which there’s been almost no accountability in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN: You said at NYU, speaking last night, that some 25 European countries have been complicit in these CIA prisons and rendition.
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Mm-hmm, exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: So what kind—how do you hold a probe? Who does it?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: Well, ideally, it’s the country itself. Macedonia, for example, was found guilty of failing to conduct an effective investigation into its complicity. So we have to keep holding their feet to the fire and say, "You have to get to the bottom of this. And somebody is guilty and has to be held accountable." Italy, for example, did try a number of people, both local agents and they called for the indictment of a number of CIA personnel. But afterwards, they were pardoned by the president, so those cases were discontinued.
But I think the key is, we need—what these incidents show is a complete lack of democratic oversight of security services. The security services, both in extraordinary rendition and later in surveillance, were doing whatever they wanted. And nobody rang the alarm bell when they should have.
AMY GOODMAN: What should the U.S. do right now?
NILS MUIŽNIEKS: The U.S. should cooperate with the countries, such as Poland and others, that have been required by the European Court of Human Rights. They should provide them information. They should also provide assurances that these people will not be subject to the death penalty, because the death penalty is outlawed in Europe. And it should come clean and shed light on all of these misdeeds—the torture, the rendition—so as to prevent it from happening again.... Read More →Headlines:
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Rev. Clinton Jones Sr.: "So today I need some answers. I need to know why, why my son is gone today. Why?"
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