Latest news with #Lindh
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.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
United Autosports drivers find a lot to savor in belated Rolex 24 win
Rasmus Lindh woke up Tuesday morning after the Rolex 24 At Daytona to a pair of missed calls — one from co-driver Dan Goldburg, the other from CEO and co-owner of United Autosports Richard Dean. They were trying to tell Lindh that he and the rest of the No. 22 United Autosports USA crew had won LMP2 when it was found that Tower Motorsports' car had failed post-race inspection, bumping them up from a bittersweet second place. In 48 hours' time, Goldburg, Lindh, Paul di Resta and James Allen were all gathered for a press call after the results had been declared official. 'We just kind of set about doing what our plan was, just knocking off the [drive] time and prepping everything to be in the fight at the end. And really, everything was going great,' Goldburg recalled 'A couple things happened, and a penalty at the end kind of set us back, and we ended up second.. 'It was a tough second for us, in a weird way. We knew we should be pleased because we executed well. But we really felt we should be in that fight at the end, and didn't get that opportunity. 'So we went home somewhat pleased and ready to go on with the season… And then finding out about the penalty, absorbing the win — it's just been crazy. I mean, we're really happy about it.' When looking back on it, they'd driven one of the cleanest races in an LMP2 field that was littered with attrition. The No. 22's race was only compromised by a flat tire at the halfway mark, and a drive-through penalty in the final hour for hitting their own pit board in a congested pit lane — which both Goldburg and di Resta felt was a particularly harsh decision. While they had to watch Tower Motorsports' drivers partying hardest on the podium at Daytona, the United Autosports quartet would get the last laugh. Michael Levitt/Lumen The original second-place result would have already been a big turnaround from last year, when the No. 22 led by Goldburg and di Resta only put together a single podium finish, and started the year with Goldburg crashing out early in the race. 'I had a pretty disastrous [Rolex] 24 last year,' he admitted. 'There was a lot of thinking from there through the rest of last year and coming into this year.' A significant keystone in Goldburg's development came in qualifying when he bested his former United teammate Ben Keating, widely considered to be the premier bronze-graded driver in major endurance racing, to win the pole position in LMP2 and end Keating's run of five straight Rolex 24 class pole positions. Pole position was the start of Daniel Goldburg's Rolex 24 turnaround. Michael Levitt/Lumen 'Coming into the event, I said, I wanted to give everything I had in qualy, and then take it to a different notch for the race — and just stay clean, stay consistent, stay at a certain pace that the team and I wanted,' Goldburg said. 'When I got out of the car at about 11 o'clock on Saturday night, I had a very big sense of relief at that moment that I had done my job — done exactly what I came there to do. And I was pleased that I did my part in that.' Goldburg also said he'd taken his fitness up a level going into his second season of driving LMP2s in IMSA, and also reshaped his mental approach, being more calm behind the wheel of his ORECA 07. 'I'm just so much calmer and it just allows me to drive in a calm and controlled way, as compared to a little more on edge last year,' he said. 'Last year was very painful. I had pretty high expectations for myself. But in retrospect, I just didn't come into it thinking everything through and having the right mindset. 'In the prior year, two of our four drivers never even got in the car, and it's a strange pain you feel in that circumstances. With how much goes into these events, the preparation, the teams, the money, everybody's efforts — and then to lose it early and let everyone down is huge. It's just an amazing sense of accomplishment to make that kind of turnaround and be here where we are now.' A construction company leader during the work week and ambitious racing driver on the weekends, Goldburg has excellent chemistry with di Resta as well as Lindh, whom he'd previously raced with in LMP3 before reuniting this year. Di Resta certainly has the pedigree and recognition through his time in Formula 1, DTM and now in the WEC as a Peugeot Sport factory driver, but this race also represents a significant turning point for Lindh, who's spent time bouncing between the American single-seater ladder and the Pro-Am categories of prototype racing to little fanfare. 'I first started driving with Dan in 2020 — the COVID year,' Lindh recalls. 'I'd signed with Indy NXT then, but they closed that championship down for the COVID season and I got the opportunity to race with Dan. We went racing on and off a little bit since 2021; we did quite a few races in both IMSA Prototype Challenge and a few races in WeatherTech together. 'I've been coaching him and creating a very good relationship, and it means a lot to share this with Dan, this big win — and also with both James and Paul. It's a great team, us four. 'We came back pretty strong and pretty quick on the lead lap again,' he noted. 'The last hour and a half of the race, I had not been looking at the timing and scoring so hard in my life, I think. To win the race in this way feels a little different, but I mean, I'll take it!' 'Frankly, I wasn't taking my racing career as serious until he showed up with our team in 2020, and I realized I had a really good co-driver for the first time in my life, and it really amped me up,' Goldburg said of the young Swede. 'It really just lit a fire under my butt to take it seriously, take my fitness seriously, and it started a pretty big ramp-up in my driving.' Brandon Badraoui/Lumen Goldburg wanted Lindh to be part of United Autosports last year but couldn't make it work financially. So when Bijoy Garg moved on to be the new 'designated silver' driver at Inter Europol Competition, it opened up a spot for Lindh to rejoin him for the first time since the Swede left for Andretti Autosport in 2022. 'I know personally what Rasmus can do, but he hasn't really had the exposure in the paddock, so I was pushing to help him find a spot,' Goldburg related. 'When the spot opened up in our car, I tried very hard to make sure he would be in it. Richard and Max [Gregory, managing director] and the team, we brought Rasmus to a couple tests. He performed really well and then they saw what I was seeing — and they worked to get him in the seat. It's pretty awesome how it all came together and I'm excited to share it with him. 'I started driving with Paul last year, and the two of them have just pushed me along quite a bit, each in their own way. I credit very much where I am as a driver to the coaching from the two of them.' The drivers are all awaiting the delivery of their Rolex timepieces for winning their class, and United Autosports plans to get together ahead of the Sebring 12 Hours to celebrate as a team. UA intends to fly Allen out to be part of the festivities, even if Daytona was his only planned start of the IMSA season. 'I'm really proud to have been a part of it. I won't be joining them for the rest of the season, but I wish them all the best — and they deserve to have all the success for this year as well,' said Allen, who won his second Rolex in three years, albeit in much different circumstances to the way he won LMP2 in 2023, in his famous photo finish over Ben Hanley. 'It's not quite as exciting as the first time I won,' he admitted, 'but it still doesn't take anything away from the effort from everyone at United, and Dan, Paul, and Rasmus. All the hard work they've put together since the end of last year, and even leading up to now, has been really incredible.' Story originally appeared on Racer
