China puts the brakes on torture of suspects, witnesses

News that China had issued new rules discouraging the use of torture to encourage suspects to confess or witnesses to testify in court is a great development for the criminal justice system there, but should be a giant stop sign for western governments trying to open trade routes to the world's most populous country. Sure, the new regulations announced Sunday bring China more in line with western ideas of justice and human rights, and are welcome, but they are long overdue. China executes more people -- 1,700 a year is Amnesty International's estimate -- than the rest of the world's countries combined, according to the New York Times. Mistreatment of suspects and, sometimes, of reluctant witnesses is common in China, the Times said. What that says about Western companies and governments doing business with China is not good, since they are supporting a terrible system. Apparently, the central government's previous attempts to liberalize the system have met with mixed results, the Times said. So, the latest pronouncement by top Chinese law enforcement and judicial bodies, while positive on the surface, will only mean improvement if enforced nationwide. The new regulations, which bar the use of confessions obtained by torture and require police officers to testify in court if a defendant alleges mistreatment, were issued a few weeks after a farmer was released from prison after 10 years after he was convicted using a confession obtained through torture. The case came to light after the alleged victim turned up alive, and caused an uproar in the normally closed society -- a huge concern for the government in Beijing, which puts a premium on social order. “Judicial practice in recent years shows that slack and improper methods have been used to gather, examine and exclude evidence in various cases, especially those involving the death penalty,” the central government said in a statement, the Times said. Legal observers in China were optimistic over the new rules. “They have come just in time because the necessity is so great,” said Zhang Xingshui, a Chinese defense lawyer. “It is a good cure for loopholes, because legal workers are often under so much pressure to get cases closed no matter what it takes.” A professor at the government-owned Chinese People's Public Security University in Beijing told the Times that the provision requiring police to testify in court was revolutionary for China. “This may be common practice for police in the West or in Hong Kong, but it is a new thing for Chinese policemen to testify in court,” Cui Min said. “We have to cultivate a new mindset, one that accepts the idea of possibly setting free a criminal over wrongfully convicting an innocent man.” Of course, it would have been a lot better if Western countries had insisted on major reforms in China before opening their markets and integrating Beijing into the world economic system. But China appears to have fully embraced the idea that there is more to be gained from peaceful relations with the rest of the world than from aggressive isolation, even if it means liberalizing how the Communist Party runs the country. And that is very good news.

British court orders government to reveal information on torture

The revamped U.S. government could face the biggest test of its commitment to changing the worst excesses of the Bush administration now that a British appeals court has agreed to the disclosure of secret intelligence about the alleged mistreatment of a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The Court of Appeal in London turned down the British government's request to prevent the release of information about the incarceration of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and claimed he was mistreated while in CIA custody, according to the Reuters international news service. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, claimed he was flown to Morocco by the CIA and tortured for 18 months, including having his penis cut, before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2004, where he was further subjected to sleep deprivation and threats. Morocco has denied holding him, Reuters said. Mohamed was never formally charged and was released last year. In 2008, the British High Court ordered the release of all information held by the government in London but permitted the blacking out of seven paragraphs of information gathered by U.S. intelligence. Wednesday's order concerned the release of those paragraphs. The office of U.S. national intelligence director Dennis Blair expressed "deep regret" at the order, Reuters said. "The protection of confidential information is essential to strong, effective security and intelligence cooperation among allies," the statement said. The ruling presents "challenges," the statement said, but the United States and England "remain united in our efforts to fight against violent extremist groups." British Foreign Secretary David Miliband had argued to the court that such a disclosure could affect his country's security because such a release could make the United States less willing to share intelligence. But the court upheld a 2009 finding by two judges that "overwhelming public interest" in the information should be respected. "The treatment reported ... could be readily contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," the judges found. Miliband also said the British appellate court would probably have refused the release of classified information from the United States had the material not be released by a U.S. court in another case in December. "Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have overturned the Divisional Court's decision to publish the material," Miliband said in a statement. In England, a human rights group said the release shows the extent to which the British government had gone to defend the U.S. government's conduct of the war on terror. "These embarrassing paragraphs reveal nothing of use to terrorists but they do show something of the UK government's complicity with the most shameful part of the War on Terror," said Shami Chakrabati, director of the group Liberty.

Federal judge revives hope for legal system to reverse Bush legacy

Friday's federal court ruling allowing a convicted terrorist who claims he was tortured to sue a former Bush administration lawyer who authorized harsh treatment of detainees offers a genuine opportunity for the U.S. legal system to repair some of the worst constitutional damage done by the executive branch. In a lawsuit brought by the family of Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn man who was held in solitary confinement for more than three years after being accused of trying to set off a radioactive "dirty" bomb explosion in the United States, U.S. Judge Jeffrey White decided that the allegations were sufficient to proceed with the case. White, who was, perhaps ironically, appointed to the Northern District of California bench by George W. Bush, rejected nearly all of the government's claims of immunity in a 42-page ruling issued late Friday, according to the New York Times. White ruled that the suit had adequately alleged that attorney John C. Yoo, who wrote many of the so-called torture memos that authorized the use of invasive interrogation techniques when was a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, could have started the "series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights,” the Times said. Padilla claimed in his lawsuit that he “suffered gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part off a systematic program of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr. Padilla’s humanity and his will to live” while he was held in the U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. White said in his ruling that the case raised the question of the balance “between the requirements of war and the defense of the very freedoms that war seeks to protect,” the Times said. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, did not respond to requests for comment, the Times said. But he did write in the Wall Street Journal column last year that "the legal system should not be used as a bludgeon against individuals targeted by political activists to impose policy preferences they have failed to implement via the ballot box.” A U.S. Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the decision, the Times said. Padilla eventually was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiracy to commit terrorism in an unrelated case.

Indictments in the offing for Bush and Cheney?

What isn't being said in the uproar over President Barack Obama's recent statements about investigating harsh interrogation tactics approved by Bush administration officials in apparent violation of longstanding treaty obligations is the obvious: that all investigations lead directly to the Oval Office. We now know that Condoleezza Rice personally approved the CIA's use of waterboarding, which involves simulated drowning, in 2002, and that the technique was used more than 200 times against three suspected terrorists, according to the Reuters international news service. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney said a year later that the White House backed the interrogation program, Reuters said, citing a report issued today by the Senate Intelligence Committee. We can tell where this is going. Rice would not have approved such a controversial program without discussing it with then-president George W. Bush, her good friend, and Bush would not have agreed without discussing it with Cheney. If anyone is ever going to be held liable for the Bush administration's gross perversion of justice, the indictments certainly should start at the top.

Obama changes course; may now favor prosecutions

Seemingly just days after ruling out the prosecution of CIA agents who used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects, President Barack Obama created a media firestorm Tuesday when he said he might favor investigating and prosecuting Bush administration officials who authorized the harsh methods. Obama's statement followed weeks of denials, in which the president said the country should be looking ahead and not examining the recent past, according to the New York Times. The controversial remarks came while Obama was answering questions from reporters in the oval office. "If and when there needs to be a further accounting," he said, Congress should figure out how to get it "in a bipartisan fashion" from people independent from the government. The comments certainly suggest that that Obama now favors an independent investigation of the Bush administration policies, perhaps by a special prosecutor. Obama also suggested he might favor the prosecution of the attorneys who wrote legal justifications for the harsh interrogation policies when he said that question would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder. "I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said. Three Bush administration lawyers who signed the legal memorandums, John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, are expected to be the subject of a highly critical Justice Department report that could recommend their disbarment. Obama's latest statements come while reverberations from the administration's release of the secret memos are still reverberating in Washington. The memos revealed that two al-Qaida operatives were subjected to waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning, more than 250 times, the Times said. Release of the memos prompted the predictable howls of outrage from Obama's Republican critics, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, the Times said.