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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
The dangerous American fantasy of regime change in Iran
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Senior officials quickly tried to walk back Trump's threat. 'We don't want a regime change,' Vice President JD Vance said. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted that bombing Iran 'was not and has not been about regime change.' Advertisement The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, however, further muddied the waters by suggesting that Iranians might 'rise up against this brutal terrorist regime' if it doesn't compromise with its enemies. 'If the Iranian regime refuses to come to a peaceful diplomatic solution — which the president is still interested and engaging in, by the way — why shouldn't the Iranian people take away the power of this incredibly violent regime that has been suppressing them for years?' Advertisement It was an odd formulation, since history shows no example of a people who rebelled because their leaders refused to pursue diplomacy. In any case Leavitt's boss quickly contradicted her — and himself. When a reporter asked President Trump if he was truly seeking regime change in Iran, he replied 'No' and added: 'Regime change takes chaos, and ideally, we don't want to see so much chaos.' Mr. President: Congratulations on recognizing that essential truth. Please don't change your mind again. Iranians want a better government, but they want to shape it themselves. Regime change from within can bring new stability. Bombing cannot. Iranians have plenty of reasons to complain. Since 1979 they have been under the misrule of a repressive and corrupt clerical regime. It imposes a harsh code of conduct and dress on women and imprisons those who speak out for freedom. Great national challenges, from economic diversification to water supply, go unaddressed. Iranians, however, know perhaps better than any other people on earth that no matter how bad a regime is, the next one could be worse. The mullahs came to power in 1979 after Mohammad Reza Shah was overthrown. The coalition that swept the shah out was wildly diverse, from religious fanatics to Communists to liberal-minded democrats. No one knew what the post-shah regime would be, but all agreed that whatever emerged would be an improvement. They were wrong. Instead of going from bad to good, conditions went from bad to worse. If the mullahs are deposed, that could happen again. Many Iranians don't want to take that chance. Their own neighborhood provides sobering examples of the devastation that American-sponsored regime change can bring. Syria, Iraq, and Libya were all stable countries under dictatorship. People were able to live normal lives as long as they did not criticize the government. Anyone could walk the streets safely or sit in a cafe without worrying that a terror bomb might explode. Advertisement After American power led to the fall of the Syrian, Iraqi, and Libyan leaders, democracy did not emerge. Syria is ruled by a former terrorist for whose arrest the United States once offered a $1 million bounty. Iraq is factionalized and dysfunctional. Libya is a failed state and breeding ground for terror. Iranians have painful collective memories of foreign intervention. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia and Britain effectively controlled Iran. They seized Iran's territories in what are now Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. Britain imposed an accord that gave it ownership of Iran's vast oil reserves. When democracy finally emerged in the 1950s and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, the United States and Britain organized a coup to depose him. That led to 25 years of royal dictatorship followed by more than 40 years under the mullahs. Many in Iran share two basic convictions: The regime is bad, but foreign powers should not try to overthrow it. That is not a contradiction. Political change that comes after bombing or invasion is usually for the worse. If it comes from within — if Iranians rather than outsiders shape Iran's fate — it will be more authentic, profound, and long-lasting. Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Too late for accountability
I've been involved in some of this century's most controversial national security and human rights cases involving Americans fighting against government overreach and sometimes lawlessness – cases involving offshore torture, secret mass surveillance, drone strikes on innocent civilians, and the coverup of a friendly-fire death of a U.S. solidier. As a human rights attorney, I've seen some of the worst conduct by government employees, military officials, and private contractors – often done under the weighty guise of protecting the country from mythical ticking time bombs. My unfortunate niche is innocent Americans who were mistreated, maimed, or killed in the name of elastic, expansive, nebulous, and incendiary words like 'terrorists,' 'insider threats,' 'enemies within,' 'illegals,' and 'traitors.' I am a first-hand witness to our nation's decades-long descent into lawlessness. I know exactly how we got here. President Obama's decision to 'look forward, not backwards' (an ethos also embraced by predecessors and successors alike) past the architects who carried out and covered up torture and other human rights atrocities paved the way for today's lawless incursions on people's fundamental constitutional due process rights and political freedoms. The shocking circumstances of Kilmar Ábrego García's detention in an El Salvadoran gulag is the logical conclusion stemming from impunity for egregious government conduct. After 9/11, American John Walker Lindh became the first U.S. prisoner in the Afghanistan war. Photos circulated worldwide of him naked, blindfolded, tied up, and bound to a board with duct tape by his American captors. It was our first glimpse of American-sponsored torture and we didn't flinch; instead, we vilified Lindh. The few of us who objected to his treatment were disciplined, demoted, fired, or in my case, placed under a pretextual criminal investigation. Lindh's case was a harbinger of what was to follow in post-9/11 America. The George W. Bush administration went on to hold upwards of 800 men and boys in the U.S. military prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base without charge, access to counsel, or judicial review. The Justice Deprtment meanwhile drafted secret internal justifications, later widely dubbed the 'torture memos,' authorizing harsh interrogation techniques. I witnessed cases where the government played word games with the now-abandoned label 'enemy combatant' to strip due process rights for U.S. citizens like Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi so that their cases could transpire in harsh military tribunals that lacked the protections of civilian criminal courts. That's why I cringe at Trump bandying about words like 'MS-13' and 'gang member.' At least back then, the verbal denigration was being done under the president's war powers. Today, it's under the power of Donald Trump's ego and little else. By 2004, techniques from Gitmo had migrated to CIA-run 'black sites,' a clandestine extrajudicial detention network in torture-friendly countries like Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Thailand. Detainees were subject to forced nudity, waterboarding, mock executions, genital electroshock, anal rape (euphemistically called 'rectal feeding') and other horrors. Journalists eventually exposed the extent of the torture regime with the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, featuring hundreds of sadistic photos of naked prisoners stacked in a pyramid, a hooded prisoner with electrodes attached to him, a female soldier leading around an unclothed captive by a dog leash, and far worse. In 2009, Barack Obama declared an end to secret detention and harsh interrogation, admitting that, 'We tortured some folks.' However, he also decided to 'look forward, not backward' at the bad actors. No government officials were ever held accountable for designing, approving, or implementing the torture program. The only CIA officer to serve prison time in connection with the torture regime was my client John Kiriakou, blew the whistle on it. The head of the program, 'Bloody' Gina Haspel, went on to direct the CIA. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 'Torture Report' of over 6,700 pages, but a heavily-redacted 'summary' was all that ever reached the public. Obama shut down civil lawsuits with the state secrets privilege, which Trump just invoked to refuse a federal judge information about the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. The worst actors were all promoted, went on to write books, or moved on to better paying gigs with defense contractors or corporations. None of this dark history made the military think twice about holding U.S. Army whistlelower Chelsea Manning in a hot, dark cage in Kuwait in 2010, and later subjecting her to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that was held to be torture. She suffered regular strip searches and nearly a year in solitary confinement. I was one of a only a handful of human rights attorneys to attend her court-martial and sentencing. I hoped that during the next decade, the pendulum would swing back from 9/11 overreach and regain some semblance of equipoise. Instead, the U.S. brought more criminal cases against press sources than all previous presidential administrations combined. The defendants were all Americans, with extensive military and/or government service. Even more disturbing, the cases were brought under an antiquated World War I era law called the Espionage Act of 1917. The most disturbing part is that most of the defendants were whistleblowers (not spies or saboteurs) who had exposed government fraud, waste, abuse and illegality. It's all the more jarring considering that Trump just used an even more ancient wartime authority, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to justify the deportations of some 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador a month ago with no due process and against a court order. (The judge just found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for violating that order.) The U.S. ignored criminal, civil, and humanitarian laws underlying many of the abuses I've discussed that occurred before the Ábrego García imbroglio. But once lawyers, journalists, and human rights/civil liberties/accountability organizations exposed the injustices – and judges weighed in to enforce legal and constitutional constraints – the government obeyed court decisions to provide detainees their rights to counsel, due process, judicial review, and habeas corpus relief. The government ultimately dropped the 'enemy combatant' label it had used to create a legal black hole for detainees. By January 2025, only 15 detainees remained at the notorious Gitmo facility, but Trump wants to expand it to detain 30,000 migrants. And now he has expansive executive authority, an enabling Justice Department, a slumbering Congress, and judges whom he is disobeying. The Supreme Court's recent grant of presumptive presidential immunity from prosecution for all of a president's official acts just further insulated unchecked extralegal conduct. Their 'middle of the night' 7-2 decision this weekend granting the request in an emergency appeal to block further extradition flights may be too little too late. The same Supreme Court effectively insulated extralegal conduct as long as it has the imprimatur of being 'official.' The Ábrego García case seems to have crossed that line. But instead of line-crossing and then backtracking, Trump is doubling down on lawlessness and enjoying the bubbling constitutional crisis. History will justifiably excoriate the United States for this, whether our democratic republic survives or not.
