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Parsing the Legality of Trump's Ban

February 1, 2017

Christiane Amanpour of CNN speaks with Former U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora on the legality of Trump's ban.... Read more about Parsing the Legality of Trump's Ban



Alberto Mora. 1/27/2017. “Law Restricts Trump on Torture - Unless He Ignores It.” Deutsche Welle.Abstract

New article in Deutsche Welle featuring Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

Donald Trump has threatened to make good on his campaign pledge to bring back waterboarding and forms of torture "a hell of a lot worse." That would violate international and US law, of course, but could he do it anyway?

There was a sense that the US was coming to grips with its sins in December 2014, when the Senate completed its report on CIA torture under President George W. Bush in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Months later, on June 16, 2015, when more than 20 Senate Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in a 78-21 vote to ban torture once and for all, there was a sense that the country was even moving forward. There would be no more "rectal feeding" of prisoners in the CIA's secret interrogation centers, no more threats to kill inmates' children or parents, no more people killed by hypothermia after spending hours forced into stress positions on frigid concrete. But 230 miles (385 kilometers) from the US Capitol on that very same June afternoon in 2015, a reality television host was kicking off a scorched-earth campaign at the New York City tower he had named for himself. And in 2017 the United States finds itself debating the limits of official cruelty all over again - though not necessarily the long-settled legality.

"Torture under international law is categorically prohibited under all circumstances," said Alberto Mora, the Navy's general counsel during the Bush administration and a leading Defense Department opponent of the practices euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation." "This is what's called a nonderogable law, meaning that there is no set of circumstances or extenuating circumstance which would justify the application of torture."

Read the full article.



Alberto Mora. 1/12/2017. “Mike Pompeo Is Unfit to Lead the CIA If He Doesn't Reject Torture.” The Guardian .Abstract

Article in The Guardian by Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

"Among the flurry of confirmation hearings happening this week in the Senate, one in particular will signal whether President-to-be Donald Trump and his administration are, indeed, serious about restoring the failed and discredited Bush-era torture policy.

Trump’s pick for CIA chief, the US representative Mike Pompeo, will face the Senate intelligence committee and no doubt will be asked about his past support for cruelty. If he fails to renounce torture at his hearing, the Senate should deem Pompeo unfit for the office and vote down his nomination.

I know what’s at stake from my own experience. I was the navy’s chief lawyer when, in 2002, I learned that detainees held at Guantánamo were being subjected to cruel and unlawful interrogation practices. This wasn’t a case of “bad apples” – it was a case of officials at the highest levels of government choosing to radically reinterpret, distort or violate the law so as to knowingly apply torture. That can’t happen again."

Read the full Op-Ed in The Guardian.



Steven Livingston and Jonathan Drake. 1/9/2017. “We tried to save 150 people in Aleppo from 5,000 miles away.” The Washington Post .Abstract

Article in The Washington Post by Carr Center Senior Fellow Steven Livingston.

"With Russian and Syrian forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad’s regime rapidly closing in, the situation for those trapped in eastern Aleppo in the first week of December was growing grimmer by the hour. It was especially dire for the White Helmets, a Syrian first-responders group that had won international acclaim for its humanitarian work, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Assad regime held a different view, describing the group as rebels and terrorists.

On Dec. 8 at 3:30 p.m. in Boston, one of the first messages from the White Helmets to reach researchers at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative said that “three gas bombs have been dropped in the area within the last two hours and they [the White Helmets] feel they have less than 48 hours to evacuate before they are seized.” The Harvard group was asked to help find an escape route out of Aleppo for the White Helmets and their families, about 150 people in all.

How could Harvard scholars sitting in Cambridge, Mass., help 150 people find their way out of a war zone? We hoped it could be done with commercial remote-sensing satellites."

Read the full article in The Washington Post.

Steven Livingston is a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a professor at George Washington University.

Jonathan Drake is a senior program associate with the Geospatial Technologies Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.



Tom O'Bryan. 11/29/2016. “In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Donations Were Too Little Too Late.” Foreign Policy .Abstract

Read the article by Carr Center Research Assistant Tom O'Bryan:

Countless studies have shown that democracies are less likely to go to war, torture their own citizens, and censor the media. That's one reason why Western governments and philanthropic foundations funnel more than $10 billion every year into promoting democracy overseas. For example, donors fund efforts to help train election observers, educate voters about their rights, and train local media outlets to cover political issues.

In the last year, more than $70 million have been spent on such projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a poor and fragile country emerging from over two decades of armed conflict. That may sound like a lot of money, but in relative terms it's not. The American, British and Canadian governments alone spent more than eight times that amount on democracy promotion in Afghanstan during the country's most recent elections.

Read the full article in Foreign Policy 



Appellate Court Reinstates Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit Against Private Military Contractor

October 24, 2016

A panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit  (Al Shimari v. CACI) brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of four Abu Ghraib torture victims against CACI Premier Technology, Inc., a private military contractor, for the corporation’s role in their inhumane treatment.... Read more about Appellate Court Reinstates Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit Against Private Military Contractor



Alberto Mora. 8/5/2016. “Fighting Terrorism - and the urge to ignore our basic American principles.” The Washington Post. See full text.Abstract

Op-Ed by Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

 

 

In late 2002, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service uncovered evidence that detainees were being abused during interrogations at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Concerned about the lawlessness and the professional incompetence of the interrogators, they sought out a senior attorney in the Defense Department’s office of general counsel. Nothing could be done, the attorney blandly informed them. “The decision has been taken,” he said, “and, anyway, if the public were to find out, no one would care.”



Dara Kay Cohen. 8/2/2015. “​​​​​​​Do States Delegate Shameful Violence to Militias? Patterns of Sexual Violence in Recent Armed Conflicts.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59, 5, Pp. 877-898. See full text.Abstract

Do States Delegate Shameful Violence to Militias? Patterns of Sexual Violence in Recent Armed Conflicts:

 

Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or excessively brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009, we find that this argument does not account for the observed patterns of sexual violence, a form of violence that should be especially likely to be delegated by governments. Instead, we find that states commit sexual violence as a complement to—rather than a substitute for—violence perpetrated by militias. Rather than the logic of delegation, we argue that two characteristics of militia groups increase the probability of perpetrating sexual violence. First, we find that militias that have recruited children are associated with higher levels of sexual violence. This lends support to a socialization hypothesis, in which sexual violence may be used as a tool for building group cohesion. Second, we find that militias that were trained by states are associated with higher levels of sexual violence, which provides evidence for sexual violence as a “practice” of armed groups. These two complementary results suggest that militia-perpetrated sexual violence follows a different logic and is neither the result of delegation nor, perhaps, indiscipline.



Douglas A. Johnson, Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt. 9/2016. “The Strategic Cost of Torture: How “Enhanced Interrogation” Hurt America.” Foreign Affairs, no. September/ October 9/2016. Publisher's VersionAbstract

The Carr Center's "Strategic Consequences of Torture" project was recently featured in Foreign Affairs Magazine.

In the article, Carr Center's research team, Douglas A. Johnson, Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt argue that "a truly comprehensive assessment (of torture) would also explore the policy’s broader implications, including how it shaped the trajectory of the so-called war on terror, altered the relationship between the United States and its allies, and affected Washington’s pursuit of other key goals, such as the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad."

Read the full article. 



Alberto Mora and Douglas A. Johnson. 9/1/2016. “The Strategic Costs of Torture: How “Enhanced Interrogation” Hurt America.” Foreign Affairs. See full text.Abstract

Alberto Mora and Douglas Johnson  examine the strategic costs of torture, and how enhanced interrogation hurt the U.S. 

 

Read the full article for Foreign Affairs here. 

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