New York Times

David Johnston

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.

The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said Sunday that the Justice Department recommendation to reopen the cases had not been sent to the intelligence agency. He added: “Decisions on whether or not to pursue action in court were made after careful consideration by career prosecutors at the Justice Department. The C.I.A. itself brought these matters — facts and allegations alike — to the department’s attention.”

The report by the Justice Department’s ethics office has been under preparation for more than five years, and its critique of legal work on interrogations provoked bitter complaints from Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey as he was leaving office as the Bush administration’s final attorney general.

The Justice Department’s report, the most important since Mr. Holder took office, was submitted by Mary Patrice Brown, a veteran Washington federal prosecutor picked by Mr. Holder to lead the Office of Professional Responsibility earlier this year after its longtime chief, H. Marshall Jarrett, moved to another job in the Justice Department.

There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., and in some instances not even the details of the cases have been made public.

Former government lawyers said that while some detainees died and others suffered serious abuses, prosecutors decided they would be unlikely to prevail because of problems with mishandled evidence and, in some cases, the inability to locate witnesses or even those said to be the victims.

A few of the cases are well known, like that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in 2003 in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after he was first captured by a team of Navy Seals. Prosecutors said he probably received his fatal injuries during his capture, but lawyers for the Seals denied it.

Over the years, some Democratic lawmakers sought more details about the cases and why the Justice Department took no action. They received summaries of the number of cases under scrutiny but few facts about the episodes or the department’s decisions not to prosecute.

The cases do not center on allegations of abuse by C.I.A. officers who conducted the forceful interrogations of high-level Qaeda suspects at secret sites, although it is not out of the question that a new investigation would also examine their conduct.

That could mean a look at the case in which C.I.A. officers threatened one prisoner with a handgun and a power drill if he did not cooperate. The detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was suspected as the master plotter behind the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole.

All civilian employees of the government, including those at the C.I.A., were required to comply with guidelines for interrogations detailed in a series of legal opinions written by the Justice Department. Those opinions, since abandoned by the Obama administration, were the central focus of the Justice Department’s internal inquiry.

 It has been known that the Justice Department ethics report had criticized the authors of the legal opinions and, in some cases, would recommend referrals to local bar associations for discipline.

But the internal inquiry also examined how the opinions were carried out and how referrals of possible violations were made — a process that led ethics investigators to find misconduct serious enough to warrant renewed criminal investigation.

New York Times

William Glaberson

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.

The review, requested by Mr. Obama on his second day in office, is to be delivered to the White House next week.

The president’s request, made as part of a plan to close the prison within a year, was widely seen as an effort to defuse accusations that there were widespread abuses at Guantánamo, and that many detainees were suffering severe psychological effects after years of isolation.

The report, by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations, describes steps that could be taken to allow detainees to speak to one another more often and to engage in group activities, the government officials said. For years, critics have said that many detainees spend as many as 23 hours a day within the confines of cement cells and often were allowed to exercise alone in fenced-off outdoor pens.

The report is being presented to a White House that some government officials have described as caught off-guard by the extreme emotions and political crosscurrents provoked by its plan to close the Guantánamo prison. Some critics said the report’s conclusions could intensify the debate about the prison, and put the Obama White House for the first time in the position of defending it.

The report came as officials separately said on Friday that the Obama administration had decided on the transfer of the first Guantánamo detainee since the president took office, a former British resident, Binyam Mohamed. Lawyers for Mr. Mohamed had drawn wide attention with accusations that he was tortured in Morocco on instructions from American intelligence agencies.

Mr. Mohamed, who is to be returned to Britain, was originally charged with plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” inside the United States. But the Pentagon official in charge of the Bush administration’s military commission system for conducting war-crimes trials dismissed those charges in October.

Also on Friday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the creation of a task force to begin reviewing the cases of the remaining 245 detainees. The group, which is to include representatives of military, intelligence and other agencies, is to be led by a career federal prosecutor, Matthew G. Olsen, who has been a senior Justice Department lawyer dealing with national security issues.

The administration’s plan to close Guantánamo includes a new effort to decide whether detainees can be released, transferred to the custody of other countries or prosecuted. In the report on the conditions at Guantánamo, Admiral Walsh reviewed many accusations of abuse that critics have made about the prison, said one Pentagon official who has seen the report.

The report concluded that the Pentagon was in compliance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. The review included some of the most contentious issues, including the forced feeding of hunger-striking detainees and claims that many prisoners were suffering from psychosis as a result of conditions in the detention center.

According to one official, the report noted that some detainees had difficulty communicating from cell to cell, a contention that many detainees’ lawyers have also made. The Pentagon has long insisted that no detainees are held in solitary confinement. Military officials have said instead that the prisoners are held in “single-occupancy cells.”

Some Pentagon officials have continued to press the case that the Bush administration’s approach to detainee issues — and the Guantánamo Bay prison itself — should not be abandoned. The report is likely to accelerate that behind-the-scenes struggle.

The White House had no comment Friday.

One Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved in challenging the White House plan to close the prison, argued that the report showed that the Bush administration had created a humane detention camp. Speaking of the remaining detainees, this official said the report showed that if the men were moved, they might “go from a humane environment to a less humane environment.”

Critics of the Guantánamo Bay detention center, which is on the grounds of the American naval base at the eastern end of Cuba, have been preparing for Admiral Walsh’s report. They said they were concerned that the new administration would use it to avoid major alterations to the Guantánamo detention camp during its final year.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that she and other lawyers found that conditions have remained bleak since the start of the new administration.

Ms. Gutierrez said that a report by the rights center, to be released next week, asserts that two major Guantánamo prison buildings, known as Camp 5 and Camp 6, should be closed immediately. She said prisoners there continue to be held in isolation for as long as 24 hours a day, that psychological difficulties are treated as disciplinary infractions, and that many cells are windowless.

Ms. Gutierrez said detention camp officials have recently increased detainees’ opportunities for recreation and social interaction. She said detainees’ lawyers have been concerned that some of those moves were in anticipation of visits now being made by senior members of the new administration. The attorney general is to visit Monday.

“This is really running the risk that the review is just a big whitewash,” Ms. Gutierrez added, “and we expect more of the new administration.”

New York Times

Guantánamo Bay, After Jan. 20, 2009

To the Editor:

Re “Next President Will Face Test on Detainees” (front page, Nov. 3):

While it is likely that the Guantánamo prison camp contains some very dangerous people, the American public and the rest of world may never know the real truth. After years of torture and abuse, the confessions of anyone still held at Guantánamo Bay are highly suspect, and the unconstitutional military commissions set up to try them make achieving justice impossible in any real sense of the word.

No responsible person who is calling for Guantánamo’s closure would argue that those suspected of terrorist activities should be automatically set free if Guantánamo is closed down.

What we’re demanding is that the Guantánamo prison camp be closed, the flawed military commissions be shut down and a real system of justice, based on the Constitution, be used to determine the guilt or innocence of those held there. Such a system will not rely on torture, secret evidence and hearsay.

Only by closing Guantánamo and trying detainees in civilian courts or in military courts, governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will justice prevail. Guantánamo can be shut down with the stroke of a president’s pen through executive order on his first day in office.

Anthony D. Romero 
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union 
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

Although the Bush administration has long misled the public about the dangerousness of many Guantánamo detainees, there is little doubt that some have committed serious crimes. The question is what to do with them.

Detaining them endlessly without trial has marred America’s reputation, providing a boon to terrorist recruiters and discouraging cooperation with international law-enforcement efforts, particularly by those most likely to learn of suspicious activity.

It has also allowed the detainees to glorify themselves as combatants rather than bear the opprobrium of being labeled convicted criminals.

The best solution is to close Guantánamo and provide suspects fair trials in regular federal courts, not the discredited military commissions that allow convictions based on coerced testimony.

Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, federal courts have long experience striking the proper balance between a suspect’s due process rights and the need to safeguard intelligence sources and methods.

Such criminal prosecutions are the best way to neutralize dangerous suspects while allowing America to regain the moral high ground so necessary for the long-term success of the fight against terrorism.

Kenneth Roth 
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

I almost always agree with what Nicholas D. Kristof has to say, and that includes his contention that the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed (“Rejoin the World,” column, Nov. 2).

May I suggest, however, that rather than turning it into “an international center for research on tropical diseases that affect poor countries,” it would be more appropriate — and a clear repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration — to convert the base into an international center for human rights.

That kind of a Guantánamo would not only represent an affirmation by the United States against torture, it would also make Guantánamo a very different kind of thorn in the side of Cuba than it has been over most of the last 100 years, and might be what brings human rights to the Cuban people.

It could be a place for cultural exchange, academic study and conferences, and stand as a beacon for people all over the world who are or have been victims of torture and other violations of human rights. It would stand as a reminder to all governments that torture is a violation of international law and is not to be tolerated anywhere.

Bruce L. Wilder
Pittsburgh, Nov. 2, 2008

To the Editor:

I disagree with the first of Nicholas D. Kristof’s three ways for the United States to “rejoin the world.”

After the necessary closure of the Guantánamo prison, all of Guantánamo should be returned to Cuba as a gesture of friendship and reconciliation after more than 40 years of hostility. Our continued presence there is militarily unjustifiable and politically stupid.

If the place were to be turned into “an international center for research on tropical diseases,” the Cubans could do that themselves. Their expertise in tropical medicine is internationally respected, and the United States could learn much from them.

Robert Skloot 
Madison, Wis., Nov. 3, 2008

 Le front du désert : des camps européens de réfugiés en Afrique du Nord

This article first appeared in the German journal Konkret (issue 12/2004) and traces the implementation of the creation of migrant and refugee prisons, so called off-shore centres, in northern Africa, as part of the EU’s globalisation of migration control. With the example of recent developments in EU and particularly German and Italian relations with Libya, the author highlights the relationship between military, economic and migration control agreements between the EU and third countries and documents the devastating effect these have for migrants and refugees caught up in the militarisation of the EU’s external borders.

 »How can you forget the concentration camps built by Italian colonists in Libya into which they deported your great family – the Obeidats? Why don’t you have the self-confidence, why don’t you refuse?» the Libyan intellectual Abi Elkafi recently asked the Libyan ambassador in Rome, who had initiated the country’s orientation towards the West. «The reason I write to you are the atrocious new concentration camps set up on Libya’s soil on behalf of the Berlusconi government,» Elkafi wrote in an open letter.

 In June 1930, Marshal Petro Badoglio, the Italian governor of Libya, ordered the internment of large parts of the then 700,000 inhabitants of Libya. Within two years, more than 100,000 people had died of hunger and disease in the desert concentration camps. Around the same time, Badoglio had fortified the 300 kilometre long Libyan/Egyptian border line with barbed wire fence. This is how the Italian colonists destroyed the Libyan resistance. For years, they had not succeeded – neither by bombing villages and oases, nor by using poison gas. The current Italian government laughs at any demand for compensation, Abi Elkafi writes.

 Military camps for refugees – the reality of off-shore centres

Four years ago, the western press received first reliable reports on internment camps in Libya. In September and October 2000, pogroms against migrant workers took place in Libya and 130 to 500 sub-Saharan Africans were killed in the capitol Tripoli and the Tripoli area. To escape the persecution, thousands of builders and service sector employees from Niger, Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana fled south. Many of them were stopped at road blocks in the Sahara and taken to Libyan military camps. Le Monde Diplomatique reported on several camps in where migrants and refugees have been held since 1996 – about 6,000 Ghanaians and 8,000 people from Niger are supposed to be held in one of them alone. The Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings visited the camp to bring back some hundred compatriots. The Somali Consultative Council appealed to Gaddafi on 22 February 2004 «to unconditionally release the Somali refugees who are imprisoned in your country and who have started a hunger strike immediately and not send them back to the civil war in Somalia.» In the beginning of October 2004, the Italian state TV channel RAI showed pictures from a Libyan refugee camp. Hundreds of people were depicted in a court yard, heavily guarded; the barracks apparently do not have sleeping facilities. Reports of some of the Somalis who have recently been deported to Libya confirm the existence of these camps.

Did the Libyan government originally build these camps in order to provide a labour force for major building projects in the south of the country (»greening the desert»)? Or are they an attempt to fight refugees in transit? In any case, the Libyan government already announced some time ago that undocumented immigrants would be imprisoned in southern Libya and deported. In December 2004, the Libyan interior minister Mabruk announced without further explanation that Tripoli had deported 40,000 migrants in the last weeks alone.

 These imprisonments and deportations have now become antecedents of the so-called off-shore centres of the European Union, propagated particularly by Germany’s interior minister Otto Schily. Libya is the first non-European country which allows for its camps to be integrated into the EU’s deportation policies. Together with the new airlifts to Tripoli, by which African refugees are being deported collectively from Italy since 2 October 2004, first facts of this regime have been created. At the beginning of October 2004, the designated and later suspended EU commissioner Buttiglione announced during his hearing before the European Parliament in Strasbourg that the EU did not want to create «concentration camps» in north Africa, but wanted to use the already existing camps «in which refugees are living under the most difficult circumstances.» At their informal meeting in Scheveningen on 30 September to 1 October 2004, the EU’s justice and interior ministers agreed in principle that the EU is striving for the creation of «reception camps for asylum seekers» in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Libya, not under supervision of the EU but of the respective countries.

Mostly unnoticed by the public, the EU states that form the EU’s external borders are creating the preconditions for a new deportation regime. Whereas until recently, refugees and migrants who were stopped by border police were taken into the EU country, there are now enormous reception capacities on the Canary Islands and on the southern Italian and eastern Greek islands. This «initial reception» is no more intended to lead into European cities and the already meagre EU legal protection. The camps at Europe’s peripheries are typically located near airports on former military compounds, guarded by paramilitary troops and hardly accessible even for the UNHCR. Contact to the outside world is made extremely difficult if not impossible. The facilities are secured with modern prison equipment. The Canary islands currently hold camps with altogether 1,950 places.

These camps in the Canaries, southern Italy and eastern Greece, also mark the introduction of a social change initiated by EU states: in the 1990’s the boat people were welcomed by the Mediterranean population. Although the state declared a state of emergency when large refugee boats arrived and put them into stadiums, it remained a public event which attracted many inhabitants who drove to the stadium with clothes, blankets and food. With the new prison camps, the administration now systematically separates boat people from the society they arrive in and thereby creates the organisational preconditions for mass deportations to places outside the EU, far from any legal or societal control. Extraterritorial, law-free zones are being created at the fringes of Europe.

Since the beginnings of the 1990’s, Western European migration and refugee strategy papers point to the EU intending to export the asylum procedures to places outside Europe. They outline a global migration control approach that ensures that refugees and unwanted migrants from Africa, Asia and South America do not reach Europe anymore. Central to this concept are camps encircling Europe.

Up to now these plans could not be implemented. German authorities unsuccessfully attempted to enforce this practise in the early 1990’s after the war against Iraq, when the no-fly zone was created over Iraqi Kurdistan: they wanted to declare the area a «safe haven» for Iraqi refugees, to which they could be deported en masse. This did not succeed until the NATO war in Kosovo. Within a few weeks, the war zone was surrounded by refugee camps, thus stopping hundreds of thousands on their flight to the EU.

In the beginning of the current Iraq war, Tony Blair suggested the creation of refugee camps under the supervision of the EU but outside its territory. His «new vision for refugees», published in March 2003, foresaw returning those who would apply for asylum in the EU to outside the EU’s borders. His vision was one of a ’camp universe’, set up by EU officers and made up of Transit Processing Centres (TPC) in front of the gates of the EU, together with the UNHCR and the notorious International Organisation for Migration (IOM). From there they would be able to bring the refugees back to «safe» zones near their regions of origin and select a few for entry into the EU. When that plan became known to the public, it went down in a storm of protest.

Despite the public criticism, Otto Schily and Giuseppe Pisanu, the German and Italian interior ministers, developed the idea further in the summer of 2004. The European Commission together with the Strategic Committee for Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA) were to test preliminary measures of «a European asylum office with interception functions» in northern Africa (Schily in FAZ, 23.7.2004). In practise, this proposal implies that boat people coming through the Mediterranean were to be returned to camps located in Arab states – in collective procedures and without an individual check on their nationality, their flight route or reasons for flight. This practise is called refoulement and is explicitly prohibited in the Geneva Refugee Convention. EU Member States’ constitutions as well as the European Convention on Human Rights prohibit refoulement as well. However, this practise not only concerns the violation of rights of asylum seekers. In internment camps or when deported to desert areas without support, migrants, no matter if they flee from poverty and hunger or for other «economic» reasons, suffer the same fate they were trying to flee. They are threatened with imprisonment, abuse and death.

Testing and developing military technology in the fight against migration

Recent international events have changed the political, military and economic situation to such an extent that desert camps have now come within Schily’s and Pisanu’s reach. The first barrier for unwanted refugees and migrants is Europe’s external border policy. But since EU enlargement and the global «fight against terror», these policies are being formulated under different conditions. In 2001, the German and Italian interior ministries laid down their dream of an EU border police in EU documents. The plan was intended to bring the unsafe borders of certain members under centralised control. At first, the focus was on the eastern border of accession states, but the accession states were not exactly enthusiastic about the idea that especially German, together with other EU police officers, were to secure their eastern borders. They fear that a total closure of borders will create tensions with their eastern neighbours. Further, the German border guards have reaped antipathy in the local accession population in the Oder and Neiße region with their policing practises and the NS massacres committed by German troops in the Bug river region have by no means vanished from people’s memories.

Politicians of the South European front states – as they are called in official EU documents – have less scruples. The anti-terrorist measures against the Arab-Muslim population has enforced a development of strong external borders. The operative core of a future EU border protection is based on the greater Mediterranean region. The Mediterranean Sea is a new challenge for the control fanatics. The goal is the ’virtual’ extension of European borders to the North African coasts. Even the docking of the wooden boats is to be prevented. Furthermore, the border police long to control the Sahara-Sahel-zone, together with the military and European and American secret services, thus setting up a second ’rejection’ ring around Europe. Besides stopping refugees, the oil and gas production in the desert has to be secured. Thus, the border surveillance agreement between Italy and Libya provides for an internationalised control of the 2,000 kilometres long coast line and also the 4,000 kilometres long desert border of Libya.

This can hardly be achieved by boat and jeep patrols. Control technologies tried and tested in the most recent wars will therefore also be deployed. Detection of refugees by air with optronic and radar technology is currently being tested all over the Mediterranean.

The Spanish Guardia Civil has rediscovered the surveillance tower. From above, the visual and electromagnetic identification technique can continuously and automatically scan the Straits of Gibraltar and the Moroccan coast. Other parts of the coast, due to the earth curvature, cannot be controlled by means of towers only. Nevertheless, the Canary Islands and the Spanish South Coast are equipped with the tower technology. Tests are made to link all accessible data in real time in order to identify and follow all ships in the controlled area. This technology, known as SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior), is now exported to the Greek islands.

Meanwhile, Italy is practising the use of drones, which are planned to being used in Libya’s desert borders. In October 2004, the Italian air force general Leonardo Tricarico announced that Italy had purchased five predator drones for 48 million dollars from the Californian arms company General Atomic Aeronautical Systems in San Diego. The US is using predators to chase al-Qaeda; the unknown flight object can also launch rockets. Tricarico explained that the Italian air force was planning to use the drones against terrorism as well as against irregular migration. By the end of October 2004, the Italian air force were trying to detect refugee boats from the air.

Testing of the new technologies at the South European ’front’ is co-ordinated by the so-called ad hoc centres of the EU preceding the future EU border agencies. Two sea surveillance centres are based in Spain and Greece, one air surveillance centre in Italy. Another one is responsible for ’risk analysis’. Taking the insurance business as an example and with the assistance of Europol, it is calculated where the greatest damage by irregular migration is imminent. There, surveillance is strengthened.

The ad hoc centres are combined in Schengen Committees, which by now should have long been subsumed within EU institutions regulated under the Amsterdam Treaty. These circles have launched new power centres to create an EU border protection within five years. Thus, SCIFA+ unifying the Schengen round with all EU border police forces was founded in 2002, and in 2003 the PCU was created – the coordinating unit of the practitioners. The latter sees itself as a crisis centre using focal points at the external borders to push through the centralised command structures, regarding the development of preventive measures and stringent controls of national border guard units as its duty.

It is hard to say whether these EU coordinated methods have failed so far, or whether they already have fatal outcomes. On the one hand, it is reported that a planned EU manoeuvre of various national naval units in the Straits of Gibraltar and around the Canary Islands was halted due to language difficulties. On the other hand, ’high tech’ is regarded as a magic potion that motivates border police and marines who believe their work thereby becomes more valuable. The intensified search with technical equipment in the Straits has already forced boat people to use more dangerous waters to come to Europe. It can also be assumed that EU agencies declared the arrival of boat people on the Italian island of Lampedusa ’a state of emergency’ in order to justify the need to implement extraordinary measures.

It is important to remember that according to official estimates, 400,000 to 500,000 people secretly cross the southern EU border every year. Whoever can afford it, arrives by plane with a false passport. Whoever has relatives and friends might go on one of the ferries engaged in the massive holiday traffic. Only the poor come on wooden boats. According to reliable calculations, more than 10,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea since 1992, that is since visas became obligatory for the EU’s southern neighbours. The European governments, however, do not declare a state of emergency because of the huge death tolls, but because of the arrival of around 30,000 boat people per year. In late summer 2004, around 1,800 people reached the island of Lampedusa. Obviously a high figure for a small island but small compared to the Mediterranean figure as a whole. The Italian state and the EU use them as a warning to others. Deterrence is the goal.

Oil interests and migration control – the economic agenda

The second aspect which brought the Libyan desert camps within reach of Pisanu and Schily is of economic nature. Since the mid-1990’s, Gaddafi has slowly opened up Libya’s economy and thus the oil and gas industry to foreign investors. Besides Russia, Libya is the most important non-European oil supplier for Germany, whereas Germany is the most important goods supplier to Libya after Italy. In 2002, the German minister for trade and commerce announced an ’export offensive’ in the Middle East and North Africa – implying increasing investments in the oil and gas industry in these regions. The potential gains to be made from Libya have first priority here. In the 1970’s, before economic cooperation decreased, most of the German investments in North Africa and the Middle East were made in Libya. Now, the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry does not only predict investment opportunities in the Libyan energy sector but also in infrastructure, telecommunication and health. Another big market is the food supply for the population, most of which has to be imported.

24 March 2004: The British prime minister Tony Blair visits Gaddafi. The Dutch-British oil company Shell receives a 165 million Euro contract to produce oil and gas in Libya, forming the basis of a «long-term strategic partnership». There is talk of a «oil against weapons» deal, because around the same time, the arms company BAE initiates talks on major business with Libya. Libyan’s armed forces want new equipment. The wish list includes night vision gear and air radars.

In July 2004, Libya clears the way for the participation of foreign investors in state companies. The government decides on the privatisation of 160 state companies, 54 of which cannot only sell shares to foreign investors but can be taken over by foreign capital by allowing for majority shareholding. The plan is to privatise 360 firms until 2008. At the end of July, the WTO lobbies for the accession of Libya. In August 2004, the German government re-introduces the so-called Hermes-Bürgschaften for Libya, which allows exporting companies to insure themselves against economic and political risk scenarios (many exporting firms can only export to certain countries with this guarantee).

On 5 September 2004, the Libyan state invites numerous interested firms from all over the world for a presentation on new oil and gas fields. The neo-liberal Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanim announces that production licences will be put up for bidding in the coming months. According to recent estimates, Libya has the eighth biggest oil reserves world wide. The country currently produces 1,6 million barrels of crude oil per day. The goal is to increase production up to 2 million until 2010, with the help of numerous new foreign investments – in 1970, 3,5 million was produced per day. The low production costs and high quality of Libyan oil is attractive to foreign investors.

7 October 2004: Italian president Silvio Berlusconi visits Libya for the fourth time that year. This time to open the pipeline ’Greenstream’ of the ’West Libyan Gas Project’, built and operated by the Italian ’energy giant’ ENI, the number one of the foreign companies active in Libya. 6.6 billion dollars were invested into the 520 kilometres long pipeline, now supplying gas from the Libyan Mellitah to Sicily. Until now, it is the biggest Mediterranean project of its kind and makes a second pipeline for Algerian gas obsolete. The day for the opening was chosen to coincide with the «day of revenge» in Libya, which celebrates the victory over colonialism since the 1970’s. In consideration of Belusconi, Gaddafi renames it the «day of friendship» and declares the once despised enemy to be welcome guests.

11 October 2004: The EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxemburg resolve the political barriers to economic cooperation with Libya. The council of ministers revokes the relevant UN sanctions from 1992 and 1993. The arms embargo is also revoked by the general EU framework for arms exports to third countries. The precondition for these changes was the Libyan agreement to pay compensations for the victims of a bomb attack on a Berlin discotheque in 1986, similar to Libya taking responsibility for the attack on the Pan-Am machine which crashed over Lockerbie. Furthermore, Libya is introducing a neo-liberal market economy, as is laid down in the Euromed partnership agreements between the EU and its Mediterranean neighbouring states.

14/15 October 2004: Chancellor Schröder, accompanied by German industrialists, visits Gaddafi. Schröder signs a bilateral investment agreement and is present when oil and gas concessions are granted to the German Wintershall, a subsidiary of the BASF group, represented in the country since 1958 and one of the leading foreign producers with an investment of 1.2 billion dollars. During the chancellor’s visit, the German RWE group also started business in the oil and gas production, and the German Siemens group received contracts worth 180 million. Furthermore, the German government is interested in orders for «technical material like night vision gear or thermal cameras for border protection». Germany’s economic goal is to dominate the Libyan foreign investment market. When Gaddafi mentions to the chancellor that Rommel’s landmines are still causing accidents and that it was high times to clear them, the German side ignores the issue without comment.

The military and migration control – the foreign policy agenda

The third reason for Schily and Pisanu to be interested in the desert is of military nature and is closely connected with border fortification, camp policy and oil and gas production: the German economy openly links economic aims in North Africa and the Middle East with its military planning, because the markets in question are said to «have specific security risks». This is why on 11 February 2005, the Federal Association for German Industry and the Federal Association of German Banks directly linked its ’Conference on Financing in the Region North Africa Middle East’ to the ’Munich Security Conference’, which takes place annually to enable Western states to coordinate their military policies and war tactics. In February 2005, EU foreign policy therefore joined EU strategies regarding refugees, the military and the economy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Like Pakistan and Turkey, Libya could soon be a privileged partner of the West as a stronghold against Islamism and Africa’s failing states. Because of his leading role in Africa’s integration and the African Union (which replaced the OAU in 2001), Gaddafi has a special influence in a lot of dependent states. This became clear during his role in freeing the hostages from Switzerland, Germany and Austria who were held in the Sahara. Negotiators and money from Libya also played a central role in the negotiations around some Western tourists, amongst them Germans, who were held by extremists on the Philippines in the summer of 2000. Now British officers will operate as consultants to the Libyan army. A military co-operation with Greece is agreed upon.

Resulting from a deal with Italy in 2003, Libya is currently purchasing boats, jeeps, radar equipment, and helicopters for border surveillance. Italian trainers and consultants are already in the country. According to press reports, Rome supplied tents and other material for three camps in Libya in the first days of August. «The camps are being set up», said Pisanu in an interview with the newspaper La Republica, «they were never under discussion». Meanwhile, the Italian navy is guarding large areas of the Libyan coast. Under pressure from Rome, Egypt is controlling the Red Sea for refugee ships. Funded with money from Italy, Tunisia is operating 13 deportation prisons of which 11 are kept secret, safe from public scrutiny. It is said that many of those refugees and migrants deported from Italy are being transported to the Tunisian-Algerian desert and abandoned there.

The German government is also responsible for arming the North African coast. According to the German defence ministry, Tunisia will receive six Albatross speed boats from the German navy. Already two years ago, it was agreed to deliver five speed boats to Egypt. In 2002, Algeria received surveillance systems at a value of 10,5 million EUR, Tunisia received communications and radar equipment for around 1 million EUR, Morocco received military trucks worth 4.5 million euro.

The Western industrial countries have described the assumed danger in and from the Mediterranean region in two scenarios: One focuses on Islamic fundamentalism, the other on uncontrolled migration. It is surprising how these two completely different social phenomena are conflated in this vision of threat. Agreements of the EU countries state that al-Qaeda and the boat people use the same North African networks. In the meantime, search units are being formed whose remits are to fight both enemies together.

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EDITORIAL

New York Times

 In a long series of valedictory speeches and interviews, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been crowing about Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and abusive interrogations, claiming they met the highest legal standards and that no prisoner had been tortured. Fortunately, the truth broke through the noise, in the words of some of the very people ordered to carry out the policies.

 In an interview in The Washington Post, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who runs the military tribunals at Guantánamo, said that harsh interrogation methods had endangered the life of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national accused of planning to take part in the 9/11 attacks. Authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they included sustained isolation, nudity and prolonged exposure to the cold.

 “We tortured Qahtani,” Judge Crawford said, adding that she was therefore unable to prosecute a man who seemed to pose a real threat to the United States.

Judge Crawford was not the only one speaking out. Major David Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who was assigned to defend another Guantánamo prisoner, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that he and all the other defense lawyers in the system consider the tribunals “unfair, rigged” and unconstitutional. He noted that his client’s prosecutor resigned to protest the lack of evidence in the case.

That is the real nature of Mr. Bush’s grotesque legacy: abuse and torture at an outlaw prison where hundreds of men — many of whom did nothing — have been held for years without real evidence or charges. And truly dangerous men were treated so badly that it may be impossible to bring them to justice.

It will be hard enough to close down Guantánamo as Barack Obama has vowed to do, but the legal burdens Mr. Bush is dumping on his successor are much greater.

The appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, railroaded through Congress, must be repealed. Interrogation rules that respect American values and laws and the Geneva Conventions must be set for all government agencies, including the intelligence agencies.

And there is the profound question of whether the new administration should prosecute those who tortured and abused prisoners — and those who ordered them to do it. Judge Crawford’s legal finding that torture occurred adds a new complication, since a treaty obliges the United States to investigate such allegations.

We have heard a lot of talk about how the country needs to look forward and not backward. We certainly would like to forget the horrors of the last eight years. But you cannot fix something before you know exactly how it is broken. The clandestine system Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have built will not give up its secrets easily.

To ensure that the abuses stop, Mr. Obama and his administration will have to work hard to find out all that has happened. They will have to locate and override all of the policy memos, directives and executive orders that have redefined and condoned torture and other abuses. Guantánamo is the place to begin.

 The timetable: Mr. Obama is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he is beginning the process of shutting Guantánamo. We hope he sets a target date. That may make it easier to persuade other governments to agree to accept some prisoners — one of the difficult challenges ahead. But we do not agree with critics who insist that date must fall within his first 100 days.

This page called early and often for closing Guantánamo. But we recognize that this is going to be very hard work.

 Sorting out the inmates: Mr. Obama’s lawyers will have to review every file, most of which the Bush administration has refused to turn over to any authority, including Congress. We know from bitter experience that the Bush administration’s judgment is worthless when it comes to what these prisoners may have done, how they have been treated and what justice they should face.

Just last week, Mr. Cheney claimed that the interrogation of prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of 9/11, who was tortured by waterboarding, allowed the United States to capture a “very impressive” list of Al Qaeda leaders in 2003. If that is true, Mr. Obama needs to know who they are, where they are, and what was done to them in the last five years.

A blueprint: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, has a bill for closing Guantánamo that Mr. Obama should embrace. It sets a one-year deadline and requires that every prisoner either be charged and tried in United States federal court; transferred for trial by an international tribunal under United Nations authority; returned to the custody of the government of their homeland, if that government does not abuse and torture prisoners; held as a prisoner of war; or, simply, released.

The separate system of tribunals created by the military commissions act must be abolished. They are a mockery of American justice, and utterly unnecessary.

It was extremely encouraging to hear Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s choice for attorney general, say at his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the new administration is open to trying prisoners in the United States. It is appalling that an attorney general nominee has to say he respects the law, but such is the Bush legacy.

The real bad guys: After the prisoners are sorted out, Mr. Bush’s egregiously bad judgment leaves all Americans with a huge problem. The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.

Mr. Obama’s team will have to come up with a solution that does not set such men free. We are not sure what it should be, but there is one unacceptable choice: creating a new detentions law that would allow them held without trial. That would merely compound Mr. Bush’s catastrophically bad choices.

Interrogations: The 2006 military tribunals law bound military interrogators to the Army field manual’s rules, which conform with the Geneva Conventions — unlike Mr. Bush’s policies. But, at Mr. Bush’s insistence, the bill carved out an exemption that allowed intelligence agencies to go on hiring civilian interrogators and to engage in practices that are clearly immoral and illegal. Ms. Feinstein’s bill would eliminate the loophole on how prisoners are treated and ban the use of civilian interrogators.

We were glad to hear Mr. Holder state that the Obama administration considers the Geneva Conventions binding. But we wish he had been more clear on a solution, beyond calling the Army field manual a “good start” for interrogation rules in C.I.A. prisons. We also were unclear from his answers whether Mr. Obama has decided, as he should, to ban civilian interrogators.

Mr. Holder unequivocally declared waterboarding to be torture, which his predecessors would not do. But this is not just about waterboarding. Other practices, like forced nudity, prolonged isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, are abuses under the same laws and treaties that prohibit torture. And Judge Crawford reminded us that torture is not necessarily just one terrible act. In the Qahtani case, she said: “This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive.”

C.I.A. prisons: We have never heard a convincing explanation for why the Central Intelligence Agency needs its own network of prisons beyond the reach of law, in undisclosed locations. If there is a good reason, we hope this administration will explain it. We are skeptical, and we urge Mr. Obama to support Ms. Feinstein’s bill, which would require the C.I.A. to report all detainees to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We recognize that this is a daunting agenda, and that to succeed, Mr. Obama’s White House, Justice Department and Pentagon will also have to rebuild demoralized legal divisions where professionals were replaced with apparatchiks whose mission was to twist the law to justify their masters’ decisions.

This work is essential to restoring the rule of law. It is essential to restoring this country’s reputation around the world. And it is essential to restoring Americans’ faith in themselves and in their government. That is the only way to move forward.