Month: January 2017

Several people have been detained at airports within the United States and others have been barred from boarding international flights destined for the U.S., according to U.S.-based lawyers and international airport officials, as an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Friday restricting travel from certain countries begins to take hold.

The executive order went into immediate effect Friday night, banning citizens of seven majority Muslim countries and stranding some at airports mid-journey. The New York Times newspaper is reporting that lawyers have already taken legal action on behalf of two Iraqi refugees being held at New York’s JFK Airport and requested a process that would extend the lawsuit to include all refugees who say they are being illegally detained at U.S. airports.

The lawyers, who are working with the International Refugee Assistance Project and other civil rights groups, told the Times one of the men being held in New York worked with the U.S. government in Iraq for 10 years and the other was traveling to America to join his wife and young son, who already live there.

“We’ve never had an issue once one of our clients was at a port of entry in the United States,” one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, told the Times. “To see people being detained indefinitely in the country that’s supposed to welcome them is a total shock.”

Officials at the Cairo airport in Egypt said an Iraqi family was barred from boarding a plane destined for New York because of the new regulations.

When the flight manifest was sent to JFK airport in New York, officials there responded with instructions not to let the family – a man, his wife and two children – on the EgyptAir flight.

Qatar Airways told its customers from the seven countries they would need either a green card or a diplomatic visa in order to board a flight destined for the U.S.

Potential constitutional collision

Paul Callan, a CNN legal analyst and former New York City prosecutor, told VOA refugees and others can legally be blocked from entering the U.S., but once they arrive on U.S. soil, dealing with them becomes more difficult because they are protected by the U.S. Constitution.

“You can block people from coming into the country. But once they’re in, all persons have constitutional protections if they’re in the United States and certainly if there is a claim that those constitutional rights are being violated by an executive order, that claim would go to the U.S. Supreme Court, so I think we’ll see a lot of litigation on this issue,” he said.

It is not yet known how many people are being held within the U.S. in compliance with the executive order, which suspended entry from those seven majority Muslim countries for 90 days, but didn’t account for those already in transit.

VOA contacted the State Department to inquire what guidance the agency is providing to those refugees currently in transit to the U.S. or legal permanent residents of the U.S. – so-called green card holders – who may currently be out of the country.

A spokesman responded that the State Department is working to put the executive order into effect and the “safety and security of the American people always comes first.”

“We take seriously our responsibility to safeguard the American public while remaining committed to assisting the world’s most vulnerable people,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security told Reuters green card holders would be included in the ban.

“It will bar green card holders,” spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said.

In addition to barring residents of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days, the Trump executive order put a permanent ban on admission of Syrian refugees and a 120-day ban on all other refugees entering the U.S.

The president said Friday that only people who support the United States should be allowed into the country. The executive order he signed discussed identification and verification procedures that U.S. consular officers should use in extensive detail.

“We don’t want them here,” said Trump. “We want to make sure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.”
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Plans to reintroduce tigers to Central Asia, using the Amur tiger from Russia, have been a topic of discussion for about a decade. But the idea got a scientific boost earlier this month when a study laid out the options for restoring tigers to the region and identified a “promising site” in Kazakhstan that could support nearly 100 wild tigers within 50 years.
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The changes announced recently by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev are themselves not very significant but the fact there are changes is important. Nazarbaev turns 77 this year and his speech was about a transition and a reminder the post-Nazarbaev era might not be too much further in the future. (The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL.)
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As its self-styled “caliphate” crumbles, militants from the group Islamic State (IS) are being driven out of areas of Iraq and Syria by local and international fighting forces. What they leave behind is a trail of crude weapons and evidence of the human misery they inflicted.
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Who are the federal government’s rogue tweeters, using official agency social media accounts to poke President Donald Trump? Are these acts of civil disobedience or federal crimes?

The online campaign began with unauthorized tweets — on subjects such as climate change, and inconsistent with Trump’s campaign statements and policies — that have been mostly deleted from official agency accounts. It shifted tactics Thursday as at least 40 new but unofficial “alternative” accounts for federal agencies began spreading across Twitter. It wasn’t clear how many unofficial accounts were being run by government employees, but there were early indications that at least some had been created by federal workers using their work email addresses — and that may have exposed their identities.

The administration said the earlier Twitter actions involved tweets by unauthorized users — at least one was a former employee — who still had passwords for the agency accounts, including one case involving the account for the Redwoods National Park in California. Legal experts said the Justice Department could prosecute such tweeters under federal hacking laws, but the FBI so far was not involved.

Unauthorized user

“An unauthorized user had an old password in the San Francisco office, went in and started retweeting inappropriate things that were in violation of their policy,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said.

Separately, the National Park Service said tweets published earlier this week on the account of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota had been posted by a former employee not authorized to use the account.

Employees or former employees publishing unauthorized messages on official accounts could be prosecuted under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits someone from exceeding authorized access to computers. “The argument would be that the authorization to use the account was only for employees and implicitly that was extinguished when the employee left government employment,” said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University.

Even employees authorized to use official agency Twitter accounts could face legal jeopardy by posting messages they weren’t supposed to write, said Stewart Baker, a cybersecurity lawyer and former National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security official.

“If someone says you may not tweet except in these circumstances, and you tweet in other circumstances, you’re exceeding authority,” Baker said. He added that some federal courts would examine the security measures in place and could throw out cases where employees weren’t clearly violating them.

Investigation possible

“It wouldn’t surprise me if at this stage a criminal investigation was opened and criminal tools were used to investigate this, even if at the end of the day they decided not to pursue criminal charges,” Baker said.

A federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter by name, said he was unaware of any requests from federal agencies to investigate the rogue tweets.

The unauthorized messages posted under official accounts appeared to be dropping off, as the Trump administration regained control over its agency accounts. Over last weekend, immediately after Trump’s inauguration, transition staff changed all social media passwords for the Environmental Protection Agency, said Jared Blumenfeld, a former EPA official under the Obama administration who said he was speaking regularly with former colleagues.

Starting Wednesday, scores of unofficial Twitter accounts appeared purporting to represent federal agencies, mocking Trump via the same social media service the president uses daily. At least some were linked to federal employees using work email addresses who inadvertently revealed their involvement.

Addresses already present

Twitter users can choose to allow others on the service to find them by searching for their email address. In other cases, Twitter notified users who previously shared their online address books using Twitter’s “Find Friends” feature that anonymous accounts were created by federal employees whose work email addresses were already in those address books.

One side effect to the Twitter dispute? Some U.S. government Twitter accounts saw surges in followers.

“We’re thrilled you found us,” said the official account for Biscayne National Park in Florida, “for whatever reason.”
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President Donald Trump has threatened to impose taxes, called tariffs, on goods imported to the United States from Mexico and China.

Governments impose tariffs on imported goods and services to make them more expensive to consumers. Tariffs provide revenue to the government and give a price advantage to domestic producers.

A tariff could mean a foreign-made car or bottle of beer will cost more, so domestic autos or beverages sell better or can command higher prices. This makes domestic companies more competitive with foreign firms and helps them keep or even expand their workforces.

While tariffs protect domestic industries, they do so at the expense of consumers, and at the risk of increasing inflation. Tariffs also hurt foreign producers, who may press their own government to retaliate by imposing tariffs on U.S. goods headed for their home nation.

This kind of tit for tat slows trade by making it more expensive. Reduced trade can also hurt economic growth and employment by lowering demand for goods and services.

Economists say a vicious circle of rising protectionist tariffs and countertariffs slashed international trade by two-thirds during the 1930s, contributing to the Great Depression.
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Indonesia has quietly released a presidential decree addressing its roughly 14,000 refugees and asylum seekers, who were previously overlooked in the country’s laws. It is being hailed as a promising, if incomplete, first step for Indonesia, which is not a signatory to the United Nations’ 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

“The decree fills the legal vacuum regarding refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia,” Febi Yonesta, chairman of SUAKA, the Indonesian Civil Society Network for Refugee Rights Protection, told VOA. “Of course, its effects depend on how it’s executed on the local level.”

Yonesta said President Joko Widodo’s decree, released late last month, had been in the works since 2010 under the previous president, but was stalled by the number of ministries (foreign, immigration, police, law, security, health) involved.

As it stands, the decree has entered the global fray at a time when governments like those of Australia, the United States and most of Western Europe are tightening their borders to refugees and asylum seekers.

Major gaps

The decree’s language is fairly broad, outlining procedures that are already informally in place, like routing refugees to Immigration Detention Centers (IDC) and entrusting local or city governments with finding them shelter.

It does not address refugees found in international waters — significant because Indonesia is an island nation — or their right to work and education, the absence of which can create paralyzing boredom for current refugees.

“The decree does not reliably protect all human rights of refugees, such as the right to work and education,” said Yonesta, “but on the bright side, at least it doesn’t prohibit them from school or work.”

He added that Indonesia has ratified various human rights instruments that regulate the right to work and education, like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Right of the Child. “So Indonesia is bound by those obligations.”

“It’s good that the decree accepts the definition of refugees in the 1951 Refugee Convention, instead of continuing to call them illegal immigrants,” said Muhammad Hafiz, executive director of Indonesia’s Human Rights Working Group. “All relevant government agencies should co-sign this designation and recognize asylum seekers and refugees under Indonesian law.”

Yonesta said Widodo likely took the measure forward as decree rather than a law for expediency, because Indonesia’s legislative chambers are notoriously backlogged. “Unfortunately, in order to do so, local governments were not involved in the discussion,” he said, even though they carry out the brunt of refugee services.

Sparked by an acute crisis

Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, seems to have taken a particular interest in the Rohingya refugee crisis, which affects the persecuted Muslims of Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

“It’s true that the re-emergence of the Rohingya refugee crisis in 2015 affected this decree,” said Yonesta, “because the stalling discussion of this topic reopened around that time.”

Just three weeks before the decree was issued on December 31, Widodo met with former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to discuss the best way to send humanitarian aid to the Rohingya.

The decree designates responsibility mainly to the local government and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which maintains a presence across Indonesia. According to a 2010 regulation from the Indonesian director-general of immigration, “irregular migrants” can register as asylum seekers with the local office of the UNHCR and stay in Indonesia while their claims are processed.

A member of UNHCR Indonesia said they were still reviewing the decree and it was too early for an official comment.

Still, the decree should not be seen as a steppingstone toward Indonesia’s ratification of the U.N. convention on refugees. It will have “no bearing on the country’s current position as a non-signatory of the convention, making it only responsible for repatriation and settlement,” Andy Rachmianto, the Foreign Ministry’s director for international security and disarmament, told The Jakarta Post.

It also designates the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) with discovering asylum seekers, particularly by conducting search-and-rescue operations on ships suspected of containing them. Such measures might make the U.N. convention beside the point.

“The [U.N.] Refugee Convention is not the only source of state obligations towards refugees,” Martin Jones, human rights lecturer at the University of York, told Inside Indonesia.

“A domestic asylum law could be developed from alternative sources, without needing to sign the convention.”

Will refugee influx increase?

Historically, Asia has not co-signed the European model of broad humanitarian aid that emerged after World War II. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which Indonesia belongs, for instance, prizes non-interference in the domestic matters of member states.

Indonesia’s diverse refugee population includes Afghan Hazaras, Rohingya from Myanmar and Bangladesh, and Somalis. Many saw Indonesia as a brief stop on their transit to Australia, but ever since that country moved to block maritime asylum seekers in 2013, thousands of them have been stuck in limbo in Indonesia.

Unlike in neighboring Malaysia, where manual labor is accessible to migrants and refugees, many stuck in Indonesia “sacrifice freedom for food,” accepting that they cannot work so they can at least get food and shelter in one of the country’s 13 immigration detention centers.

But Indonesia’s IDCs are full to bursting, so it remains to be seen whether the country will expand its infrastructure, as well as if the decree will increase the influx of refugees.

Yonesta thinks it will not. “Indonesia is a state of transit. The decree does not affect the rate of resettlement to a third country, which is what most refugees coming to this country want.”
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Russian media reports say a former leader of Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Luhansk region has died in Russia at the age of 46.
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U.S. President Donald Trump has praised the British government’s moves toward leaving the European Union, saying that his efforts as a businessman to deal with Europe were a “very bad experience.”
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British Prime Minister Theresa May says U.S. President Donald Trump stands fully behind NATO, an alliance whose usefulness he has previously questioned.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with U.S. President Donald Trump Friday at the White House, where the two world leaders will hold a joint news conference.

She will be the first foreign leader to meet with Trump in Washington since he took office.

Both leaders have taken steps to reform their international relations, particularly through trade. Britain’s pending exit from the European Union and Trump’s withdrawal from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership will necessitate negotiating new trade agreements throughout the world.

May’s plan for the EU exit includes placing a priority on controlling immigration, although she has not yet announced any policy details.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump has not yet decided whether he will cut funding to international organizations, like the United Nations, after media reports suggested the president was looking to reduce the role of the U.S. within those organizations.

On Thursday, May spoke to a gathering of U.S. Republican leaders in Philadelphia where she said the days of the U.S. and Britain intervening in other nations to remake them in their image are over.

May said it is in British and American interests to defend their values, but not go back to what she called the “failed policies of the past.”

Watch: Britain’s May Discusses US, UK ‘Special Relationship’

“But nor can we afford to stand idly by when the threat is real and when it is in our own interests to intervene. We must be strong, smart and hard-headed.”

May also called for reform in such multinational institutions as the U.N. and NATO “to make them more relevant and purposeful.” She said their members have to stop leaning on the United States.

“Sovereign countries cannot outsource their security and prosperity to America. And they should not undermine the alliances that keep us strong by failing to step up and play their part.”

May said a Trump presidency can make the U.S. “stronger, greater and more confident,” which she said is good for the rest of the world. She said British and American conservatives share the same principles.

Trump was greeted by a number of protesters when he arrived in Philadelphia. He later told fellow Republicans it was “nice to win” the state of Pennsylvania (in the November election), which has traditionally gone to the Democrats.

He went on to reference a number of his most prominent policy aspirations, including his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, and investigating alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election.

“We are going to protect the integrity of the ballot box and we are going to defend the votes of the American citizen. So important,” he said.

The congressional Republicans are meeting for a three-day retreat at which they will plan their legislative agenda for the coming years when they will control both houses of Congress and the White House.

 
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Greece’s Supreme Court has rejected a request from Turkey for the extradition of eight senior servicemen who fled the country following the failed coup last July. 

The eight Turkish servicemen, three majors, three captains and two sergeant majors, escaped Turkey in a helicopter July 16, the day after the failed coup. They landed in northern Greece and immediately sought political asylum.

Greece’s Supreme Court rules that their rights would likely be violated given the extensive crackdown following the coup attempt, and it rejected Ankara’s extradition request. 

Watch: Greece Refuses Turkish Extradition Request for Accused Servicemen

​’Victory for justice’

“It was a great victory for European values, for Greek justice,” said Christos Mylonopoulos, the attorney for the servicemen. “It was not only the lives of the eight servicemen that was at stake. The dignity of the Greek judicial system was also at stake.”

Turkey insists the men were involved in the coup attempt, which it claims was orchestrated by the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan responded to the failed coup by arresting thousands of servicemen and women, government workers, teachers and opposition groups. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their jobs.

How will Turkey respond?

Professor Tahir Abbas of the Royal United Services Institute says Erdoğan will feel pressure to respond to the Greek decision.

“These eight individuals who escaped on the night of the coup are seen to be part of the Gulenist movement, that is seemingly behind all the elements of the coup,” Abbas said. “And none of these things have been proven or are conclusive in any way whatsoever. Yet the rhetoric is very strong. And from a rhetoric point of view, this will damage (President) Erdoğan. This will be seen as a setback to his status, his persona, as projected onto the nation.”

In a statement posted online, Turkey’s foreign ministry said the two countries’ mutual ties would be subject to a comprehensive review. There are fears the decision could derail the ongoing talks on Cypriot reunification.

“Cyprus is one of those thorny subjects that is very important in Turkish national identity,” Abbas said. “And I think given the emboldened nature of Erdoğan, it’s going to be seen as another knock back if there is a victory for peace in this respect.”

Greece — and Europe — are also reliant on Ankara to uphold the agreement struck in March last year to stop the flow of migrants from Turkish shores to the Greek islands. Turkey has threatened to tear up the deal following a dispute over visa-free travel.
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Greece’s Supreme Court rejected a request from Turkey for the extradition of eight senior servicemen who fled the country following the failed coup last July. As Henry Ridgwell reports, Ankara has reacted with fury, and there are fears that ties between the two neighbors could be severely affected.
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has assured his German and French counterparts that the United States has an “enduring commitment” to NATO, the Pentagon said.
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Britain’s top diplomat says the West may have to rethink its long-standing demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down as part of any peace deal ending Syria’s civil war.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasa said he hopes the election of U.S. President Donald Trump will end the world’s “deafening silence” on Iranian threats against the Jewish state and its citizens.
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Britain does not condone torture or inhumane treatment and its close relationship with the United States allows frank exchanges on areas of disagreement, Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman said on Thursday.

He was responding to questions about comments made by U.S. President Donald Trump in an interview with ABC that the practice of waterboarding “works,” which have sparked widespread outrage.

May is on her way to the United States where she will meet Trump on Friday. She is the first world leader to meet him since his inauguration last week.

“The point is that we have a strong relationship with America and a close relationship with America and that allows us to have frank exchanges, and where we disagree we will make it clear where we disagree,” her spokesman told reporters.

“We do not condone torture or inhumane treatment of any form.”
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Human rights advocates and European lawmakers are calling on Russia to drop criminal charges against Mykola Semena, an RFE/RL contributor who is accused of separatism in a case supporters say is aimed at silencing criticism of Moscow’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
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The Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea said that security forces were conducting an operation targeting alleged members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group that is banned in Russia.
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Your daily roundup.
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A survivor of a Philippine police raid that killed four other drug suspects asked the Supreme Court Thursday to stop such operations and help him obtain police records to prove his innocence in a test case against the president’s bloody crackdown.

 

Lawyer Romel Bagares said his client Efren Morillo and other petitioners also asked the court to order police to stop threatening witnesses.

7,000 suspects dead 

More than 7,000 drug suspects have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in June and ordered the crackdown, alarming human rights group and Western governments.

 

Four policemen shot Morillo and four other men in impoverished Payatas village in metropolitan Manila in August. Morillo survived and denied police allegations that he and his friends were drug dealers or that they fought back, according to Bagares and the court petition.

 

Morillo, a 28-year-old vegetable vendor, and the four slain men, who were garbage collectors, were shot with their hands bound and could not have possibly threatened police, the petition said. 

 

Three of the victims were ordered to kneel on the ground at the back of the shanty before they were shot to death. The last to be killed “begged to be spared, hugging the legs of one of the armed men and sobbing. As he would not let go of his hold, the man shot him on the nape,” the petition said. 

 

If the court grants Morillo’s petition to indefinitely stop such drug raids in the Payatas community and help him obtain police surveillance records and other documents, it will encourage relatives of drug raid victims and human rights groups to take legal action against the anti-narcotics police. 

Life in danger 

According to Bagares, police kill drug suspects then make it appear the victims died while fighting back.

 

“Because he survived the attack of the perpetrators and identified each and every one of them, his life is in grave danger,’’ Bagares said in his petition, which asked the court to prohibit the police officers from entering an area 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the homes and workplaces of Morillo and other petitioners, who include the other men’s relatives.

 

Police officials did not immediately comment on the court petition. National police chief Ronald Dela Rosa told a Senate inquiry Thursday that he opposes suggestions to temporarily stop Duterte’s crackdown against illegal drugs due to allegations of extrajudicial killings and other abuses. 

 

While acknowledging that some rogue police may have illegally killed innocent people, Dela Rosa stressed that 33 officers had been killed and more than 100 others wounded in clashes with drug suspects.

South Korean killed 

The Senate hearing was looking into the killing in October of a South Korean businessman. He was kidnapped by police with the intent of getting ransom from his family but ended up dead at the national police headquarters, police said. After killing the victim, the officers, including two members of an anti-narcotics force, collected ransom from the wife, police said.

 

The Philippine government has apologized to South Korea for the killing, which has alarmed Korean officials. Dela Rosa said the national police has been shamed but told senators “it’s an isolated case.’’
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Spain’s unemployment rate edged down to a seven-year low of 18.6 percent at the end of 2016, the National Statistics Institute said Thursday.

 

The number of people out of work fell by 83,000 in the October-December period, to 4.2 million. Over the year, the unemployment rate dropped by 2.3 percentage points, the institute said. 

 

The jobless rate for people younger than 25 remained at a high 43 percent, down from 46 percent at the end of 2015.

 

Despite recent improvements, Spain still has the second-highest unemployment rate in the 28-country European Union behind Greece.

 

The conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has made reducing unemployment and boosting economic growth its main goals since taking office in 2011.

 

Speaking on Onda Cero radio, Rajoy said Spain had created 1.75 million jobs since 2013. He said that at the current rate of creating about 450,000 jobs a year, Spain is on track to have a pledged 20 million people employed in 2020, up from 18.5 million at the end of 2016.

 

Spain’s unemployment peaked at 27 percent in 2013 just before it began to emerge from a severe five-year financial crisis.

 

“There’s a lot to be done, but five consecutive years of crisis can’t be resolved in a quarter of an hour,” Rajoy said.

 

Institute figures due next week are expected to show that Spain’s economy grew by 3.2 percent in 2016, making it one of the fastest growing in the EU.
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U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis plans to travel to Japan and South Korea next month – his first trip as the head of the Pentagon, a spokesman said Wednesday.

“The trip will underscore the commitment of the United States to our enduring alliances with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and further strengthen U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea security cooperation,” Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.

Mattis will depart February 1 for South Korea and travel on to Tokyo two days later. During his confirmation and his first days at the Pentagon, Mattis stressed the importance of maintaining international alliances.

U.S. President Donald Trump, however, had threatened during the campaign to withdraw American forces from South Korea and Japan if they did not pay more for the military support.

The first of Trump’s cabinet picks to be confirmed, Mattis served as the commander of U.S. Central Command and was NATO’s commander for transformation while in uniform; he retired from military service in 2013.
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The largest Russian cybersecurity company has confirmed that one of its top managers was arrested in December.

The company confirmed a report published Wednesday by the newspaper Kommersant that the head of its computer incidents investigations unit, Ruslan Stoyanov, was arrested last month along with a senior official of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s main security agency.

The newspaper reported that  both men face treason charges.

Kaspersky spokeswoman Maria Shirokova said in a statement that Stoyanov’s arrest had nothing to do with the company and its operations.

U.S. intelligence has accused Russia of intervening in last year’s presidential election in the United States through a hacker attack, with the aim of harming Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton and helping the winner, President Donald Trump.

Russia has denied the accusations.

VOA’s Russian service contributed to this report.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is moving to review how America interrogates suspected terrorists and possibly reopen secret “black site” prisons outside the United States run by the Central Intelligence Agency that former President Barack Obama shut down.

A draft Trump executive order on interrogation methods and the CIA was circulating Wednesday among high-level officials in Washington, although it is unclear when the new U.S. leader might sign the edict for the review.

The prospective order would keep open the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 41 suspected terrorists are still held, despite Obama’s unsuccessful effort to close the facility during the eight years of his presidency. Obama contended operation of the facility, where the CIA used so-called “enhanced interrogation” in questioning suspects until Obama banned it, served as a recruiting tool for Islamic State terrorists.

During his campaign for the White House, Trump endorsed bringing back waterboarding that simulates drowning, an enhanced interrogation method that Obama banned and now has been prohibited by U.S. law.

Trump said at one point he wanted to renew the use of waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse,” arguing that “torture works,” and even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.” Since then, however, he has tempered his public statements, noting Defense Secretary James Mattis’s advice that torture of suspected terrorists is ineffective in thwarting future attacks.

Trump also vowed to keep Guantanamo open, saying, “We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”

The draft order calls for top national security officials to “recommend to the president whether to re-initiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated” by the CIA, which the U.S. spy agency controlled after the 2001 al-Qaida terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The CIA is believed to have run the clandestine prisons in Iraq, Lithuania, Thailand, Romania, Afghanistan and Poland.

 

The draft document says U.S. laws should be obeyed at all times and explicitly rejects “torture.” U.S. law currently limits interrogation techniques to those found in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which does not include waterboarding or other types of enhanced interrogation.

Trump’s reconsideration of extreme types of interrogation drew an immediate rebuke from Arizona Senator John McCain. The unsuccessful 2008 Republican presidential candidate was a U.S. naval fighter jet pilot who was captured by North Vietnam in the 1960s and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years.

“The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” McCain said. “But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.”

McCain said he had been assured by defense chief Mattis and new CIA Director Mike Pompeo that they would adhere to the Army Field Manual’s limits on interrogation of terrorist suspects.

 

 
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Kazakhstan’s long-ruling President Nursultan Nazarbaev says he will delegate some of his sweeping powers to parliament and to government ministers as he transforms his own leadership into a role he described as “Supreme Arbiter.”
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