Follow Up on the News

During the Inquisition toca frequently resulted in its victims admitting to casting spells on their innocent neighbors or other such unacceptable behavior for which they would be burned at the stake. When it was used on a man alleged to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, the captive confessed responsibility for almost 30 terrorist plots, including assassination designs against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Pope John Paul and other leaders. Mohammed, frequently referred as “KSM,” is one of six individuals the U.S. government designates as “high-value detainees” who could be executed at Guantanamo following military “commission” trials set to begin.
Held devoid of outside contact since his capture in Pakistan in early 2003 until he met his defense counsel, Navy Captain Prescott Prince, two weeks ago at a secret CIA camp apart from other detainees at the Guantanamo base, KSM has yet to clarify his approach to the trial with his lawyer, but Prince has stated a belief that a fair trial was not possible in the circumstances.
Michael Ratner, the West Shokan and Manhattan resident who serves as president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) defending another of the high-value captives, Mohammed al-Qalitani, has paid close attention to the KSM case. Having devoted his legal career to the defense of civil and human rights, he’s well aware of the lasting impact upon rights the decisions in these cases will have, registering them as among the most important court battles of the modern era.
“Here’s my view of (KSM). The government has admitted that he was water-tortured, right?” Ratner asked. “We represent a lot of clients who have undergone those types of torture. Essentially, my earliest experience was with guys called the “Tipton 3”, who weren’t even waterboarded but confessed to being in a training camp with Osama bin Laden. At first they denied it, then they were tortured and confessed. British intelligence has proven they were working in England at the time they were supposedly being trained by bin Laden. That gives you an example. Another client, Mahir Arar- a famous Canadian taken off a U.S. airplane at Kennedy Airport and sent to Syria for torture, supposedly also confessed to being trained in Afghanistan. He’s never been to Afghanistan in his life. He’s been completely exonerated by the Canadians. They just claimed he was al-Qaida. Basically the rule we plead applicable to these cases is ‘people under torture will say whatever their torturers want to hear.’ That’s generally been the case and my office has seen many of these false confessions- not only in Guantanamo but as a classic factor in regular criminal law. So, you have a problem with (KSM) right away.”
Ratner notes that KSM “takes credit for everything” in his statement, including deeds it would have been impossible for him to have planned. He confessed to killing the journalist Daniel Pearl, who was in Pakistan investigating ties between the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, and the 9/11 hijackings. Former CIA officer Robert Baer, whose former agency is closely linked to the ISI, has stated “My old colleagues say with 100% certainty that KSM did not kill Pearl” and even the Pearl family rejects this claim. Even the true identity of the captive has been questioned- since KSM was reported killed in a raid on his Karachi apartment in December 2001.
Referring to the then still-classified KSM confession upon which a NYCDEP police chief (who has since left the department under a cloud suggesting abuse of authority in a separate matter) based his decision to close local Monument Road, in Olive, Ratner said he can think of nothing in the statement which indicated such a threat.
“Let’s be serious here, whoever he is, and we won’t know that until there’s some independent evidence about that, it just seems crazy (to close the road on the basis of an obscure, projected threat to attack the Ashokan dam),” said Ratner, recalling the times he’s had to take the detour. “You can go over the George Washington Bridge on a truck without being checked or through the Holland Tunnel and, assuming anybody knows where the place is, they’re talking about the last of the homemade dams here and how much (explosive) it would take to blow all the way down to it; it’s absurd.”
Ratner said lawyers in his office with high security clearances that have seen some material he’s never seen but, because of how closely held by high level CIA and military officials detainee information is, he doubts that the FBI had anything to show the police chief beyond the now-declassified KSM confession.
Secret evidence is a huge problem in the cases, said Ratner.; “What they are able to do under the rubric of secret evidence is say they have all kinds of things and there’s no way of showing that they don’t. What we DO know is that to the extent they’re relied on it, it comes out that it’s not reliable or it’s exaggerated.”
Excessive secrecy has been a government hallmark since the 9/11 attacks, particularly in regard to evidence. Building debris, kept under armed guard and loaded on trucks with global positioning devices to make sure none of it went astray, was disposed of despite loud protests. The FBI seized over 80 videos of the Pentagon crash and refuse to show any of them except for a few stills. The CIA destroyed video tapes of hundreds of detainee interrogations in defiance of a judge’s orders and an air traffic control manager likewise destroyed audio tapes relating to the hijackings. Records on a man accused of being bin Laden’s driver were “lost.”
More than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody between 2002 and October 2005. Suicides at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta have been classified by military authorities as “PR exercises” and acts of “asymmetrical warfare” against the U.S. rather than indications of desperation. But some prosecutors and former interrogators will be testifying for the defense in the upcoming trials. Even Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, who was in charge of Army interrogations at Delta, now admits that “torture doesn’t work.”
Agents from the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) working to build legal cases against the detainees told MSNBC in October 2006 that they had opposed the interrogation tactics not only because they were illegal but because they were “not likely to produce truthful information, either for preventing more al-Qaida attacks or prosecuting terrorists” and may, in fact, make the cases impossible to try. There were other legal and effective ways to elicit the desired information than those in use at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and other detention sites where interrogation specialists, (some hired from private firms to evade limitations of conduct imposed by international law), plied their trade. The agents said that their own resistance to torture techniques was overruled at the highest levels of government and Ratner has some points about that we will revisit in the final installment of this report.
At this time, Michael Ratner’s group at the CCR is defending Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi accused of having been assigned a highjacking role that fateful day by KSM but was refused entrance to the U.S. and was arrested on the Afghani-Pakistani border in December 2001. Although he was one of the captives whose physical, sexual, chemical and psychological mistreatment would negate any prosecution against him in a civil or military court, he was named as one of the six to face the death penalty this month from a special military commission of officers who, unlike other courts, can consider evidence shielded from the public and even permit statements coerced by torture. Spectators approved by the Pentagon can watch the proceedings behind a sound-proofed window, listening to an audio-feed which can be cut off if the defendant begins to say anything he shouldn’t, but they are forbidden to report anything not approved by censors.
To Ratner it is, like the lightless underground steel cells and the conduct of the country in the past 7 years, “barbaric.”
CCR’s 20-something client, al-Qahtani, was interrogated 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days in one stretch, being revived in hospital at one point when his heart rate fell to 35 beats a minute. He “confessed” to being trained at al-Qaida camps and identified 30 fellow detainees as bin Laden bodyguards, all of which he later recanted. All of this as he was drugged and reduced to the “physicially and psychologically broken” state his CCR attorney Gitanjali S. Gutierrez now describes and “nothing new” was learned from him, as one interrogator admitted.
“The government has never come forward with any evidence that wasn’t obtained by torture,” Gutierrez declared. Likewise, Ratner has observed that the measures employed are anything but a formula for obtaining truthful information.
He also had some very succinct and urgent things to say about official accountability, financial motives, the questionable role of the press and the future plans of the CCR and himself which will be detailed when this report concludes in the next issue.

5-8 At The High School

At the April 23 board of education meeting, KSQ architects Armand Quadrini and Scott Hillje gave a presentation focused on a recent meeting they’d had with State Aid officials and outlined the costs on the two proposed middle school configurations. Ten percent more state aid was offered to the district if certain criteria were met and converting Bennett elementary in a middle school did not meet the requirements.
“The situation that put the middle school and high school in a shared footprint would allow you to capture the maximum state aid,” said Quadrini, although he warned that this aid configuration could change.
“I want to make sure this is understood by everyone here tonight, your basic aid is 31 percent and the State started offering this additional ten percent bump, I think about seven years ago and I think it could be pulled anytime,” he added, “The ten percent hopefully will still be out there when we go out (to bond).”
The total projected bond price tag to extend the middle school and update the middle/high facilities is $42.3 million. Additional cost to renovate and create two Kindergarten-through-four schools would cost in the $20 million to $30 million range, depending on which schools would close.
“There may be cost implications,” said Quadrini. “Once we pick a final plan the construction manager is going to re-estimate the whole project because a lot of the costs that have been estimated were done about 14-16 months ago.”
Following plan refinements, and SEQRA review, KSQ would hope to have a bond go out to voters by January 2009. If the bond were successful, Phase One would begin with the Middle school construction possibly beginning during the summer of 2010.
KSQ have added additions to the middle school configuration in order to make it separate from the high school with the library and auditorium as the only shared facilities. New construction would be added to the front end of the building with the middle school having it’s own entrance, gym and cafeteria. Food would be brought over from the high school and kept warm.
Demographic projections predict that the total population of students by the year 2014 will be 1420 students. The architects said that three Kindergarten classrooms in each school, at 23 per class, would have a capacity for 20 additional pupils. Two first grade classrooms with 25 per classroom would have an excess capacity of no more than one extra pupil. Two-second grade classrooms in each school with 25 per class would have an excess capacity of three students. Two third grade classrooms in each school with a total of 25 per classroom would have an excess capacity of one student. Two fourth grade classrooms in each school with a total of 27 per classroom would have an excess capacity of seven students.
Trustee Maxanne Resnick asked what would happen if there was a population growth that would tip classroom sizes.
Quadrini answered, “Our duty as your architect is to apply demographic enrollment as it is presented to us, so we don’t ask those questions - what if it goes down? Those are theoretical questions that are outside the bounds of the demographers’ enrollment report.”
Later in the night, nearing 11pm, a dwindled down audience was finally allowed to speak. Most expressed angered over the 15 minutes it took to make the decision and close a school.

Adam Pollack an Onteora studen, has his name on the ballot but said at a Meet The Candidates event on Monday, May 5, that he now supported the anti-incumbent slate.
All eight agree that its time to put Large Parcel to an end and all will vote no, if it comes up for a vote.
Adam Pollack is a senior at Onteora High School and will be commuting to the University of Albany this fall. His major is political science. “This is the best way to get involved since this is what I want to do with my life,” he said. Pollack lists two reasons why he decided to become a candidate; the board needs a representative for students with voting power when making decisions and he is against the five-through-eight middle school plan and does not want to see a school close because of low enrollment. His opinion is based on fairness through taxation, with every town getting it’s fair share. “If Woodstock and Phoenicia are paying school taxes, then they should have their own school.” He also suggested putting central administration offices at Bennett School, with additional space there for expansion projects important to the student community such as an athletic center, music and art, and INDIE. Pollack attended Woodstock Elementary and was against the closure of West Hurley elementary. He is Vice President of DECA, attended the Harvard Model Congress this year, is secretary of student affairs, Vice President of his senior class and helped raise $10,000 for the Woodstock skate park.
Incumbent School Board President Mary Jane Bernholz lives in Olive, is married with three children, works in real estate, valuation and consulting, and attended Ulster County Community College in business administration. She describes herself as a proactive decision and policy maker and is on the board’s audit and communications committees. Bernholz supports the five-through-eight middle school expansion at the high school and was on the middle school steering committee. She envisions, “A segregated middle school attached to the high school.” She said it is not because of the middle school but declining enrollment that an elementary school must close, a decision she supports. Although the board has not decided what elementary school it would be she said there must remain one on the east and west end of the district. “It would be either Bennett or Phoenicia and West Hurley or Woodstock,” she said. “The advantage is a two year planning period, so there would be community involvement and this makes sure everyone is comfortable in the process.” Over her past three years on the school board she offers a long list of achievements including her leadership in school nutrition, getting rid of junk food and soda, creation of no tobacco and a health and wellness policy, as well as keeping Onteora’s budgets the lowest in Ulster County. She said that if she could go back and change anything that she would communicate better with the public. She also wants to clear up what she believes is a public misconception that her vision is all about money. “We’re in the business of students and I have been personally mindful of that…”
Incumbent and board Vice President Cindy O’Connor lives in Olivebridge, is married with two children (her third and oldest son was struck and killed by a school bus driver in 2002), and owns and operates Sheldon Hill Forestry Supplies on Route 28 in Boiceville with her husband. She has a Bachelors of Science degree in marketing from Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, PA. . O’Connor sits on the audit and communication committee and over her three years as a board member is most proud of, “Raising the standard of student achievement and district wide accountability.” She has also worked diligently on the budget which she says, “Is now determined by actual expenses, student needs and prioritizing our building repairs.” She supports the five-through-eight middle school plan at the high school because. “There is no other choice when it comes to State aid.” She believes there should be two elementary schools with one at each end of the district. O’Connor regrets not being able to attend more school functions.
Incumbent Rita Vanacore lives in Shokan, is married with three children, is licensed in cosmetology, and is part owner and hair stylist at Dream Weavers in Kingston. Vanacore is on the policy and early childhood development committee. She supports adding the 5-8 middle school onto the high school, and with the district enrollment shrinking has advocated for the closing of Phoenicia Elementary. She views enrollment declining so low that in the ten years a central campus at the Boiceville site is all that that will be needed. She would like to see INDIE moved into the high school. Vanacore said she is most proud of, “The lowest tax levy in the county for three years.” She also lists accomplishments such as getting rid of junk food, support for the health and nutrition program, increasing the technology budget, limiting access to the military and the no tobacco policy. She would not do anything different stating, “Overall I am very happy with the job I have done.”
Ralph Legnini has lived throughout the district for the past 27 years, the past nine in Olive with his wife and two children, and is a musician who runs his own music production company and has recorded with artists such as James Taylor and Kate Pierson He is the director of the Children’s Aikido program at Woodstock Aikido and has a degree in music education from Herbert H. Lehman College. He is against closing an elementary schoo and believes, “We need to celebrate our different community cultures instead of morphing into one generic school.” He believes the board’s 5-8 Middle School redistricting plan may not be as cost effective as it appears and feels that the proposal to have 25 to 27 students per classroom is “not healthy from an educational standpoint.” Legnini understands that with the economy in tough times, higher taxes especially toward people on social security is difficult, but he does not believe a large bond is the answer to lowering taxes. His vision is to utilize the community for more resources and downsize the current proposed improvements to the buildings.
Woodstock resident Donna Flayhan is married with two children, is an associate professor at SUNY New Paltz, with a Ph.D in Communication from the University of Iowa. Flayhan directs the Lower Manhattan Public Health Project and is on the Advisory Board of a research think tank conducting studies on sick 9/11 workers. She said many people are moving here and demographics only recognize area births, which is why the actual school population is slightly above the demographic charts. She said if elected she would “Work towards entrusting and listening to the community where we can all come up with the best plan.” She would prefer to put funding toward fixing the buildings instead of new construction, a plan she calls a “tragedy,”and is worried about the increased cost of fuel and insurance when it comes to transporting children further to a centralized campus over neighborhood schools.
Shandaken resident Ann McGillicuddy is married with three children, has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from SUNY Purchase, and grew up in an educational family environment with her father w a public school teacher for 36 years and her grandmother one for 32 years. She moved from the Kingston area six years ago for the schools. She believes that the school boards’ decision to create a five-through-eight middle school is a bad idea and runs counter to the fact that successful rural schools tend to rely on community interaction and not a removed centralized district. “My vision is to find alternative creative solutions.” She said that research shows when students remain in their community schools with access to teachers, parents and local volunteers that they achieve at higher standards. “Either new construction or teachers-I don’t think I can choose one or the other.”
Woodstock resident Laurie Osmond is an active PTA member at Phoenicia elementary, where she has one child, and is a small business owner in media production who is a member of the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce. She attended Brown University and San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Broadcast Communication Arts. She wants to see the proposed middle school expansion stopped because she feels it shows a lack of logic behind the planning, and is angered by last-minute decisions being made about state aid formulas the board should have been aware of long ago. She wants to see studies based on State aid, lower classroom sizes and the different plans that were proposed in the past but never followed through. Osmond believes the solution is too scale back, invest in teachers, pull resources from communities and rethink all of it.

What’s Up With The City?

“There’s been a definite clearing of the atmosphere, so to speak,” said Olive Town Supervisor of the shift that’s brought his town its first reprieve from ongoing battles with the Big Apple in decades. “Something’s afoot, just what it is, I’m not sure.”
Now, it appears that what’s been happening in regards to new attitudes on the part of New York City, and its old Upstate foes, has been the result of a new round of closed-door talks going on in Albany, the City department of Environmental Protection’s Kingston offices, and other locations around the Catskills in recent months… all started under former governor Eliot Spitzer but currently being continued by his successor, Governor David Paterson.
That information arose on April 22 when the Catskill Watershed Corporation held its annual meeting out in the Delaware County village of Margaretville. Towards the end of the evening’s proceedings, it turns out, former State Watershed Inspector General James Tierney, now a Deputy Commissioner at the State Department of Environmental Conservation, announced that in fact it has been the Governor’s office that has stepped in to help solve the ongoing issue of the city’s policy of challenging upstate tax assessments.
CWC Executive Director Alan Rosa followed up, noting how he’d been warning watershed towns for over a year that the tax issue must be resolved because the City has the resources to go far through the legal system while upstate towns were going broke in the fight. He spoke about current talks run by the Governor’s office since January with optimism, and said that he felt the discussions to date had played a major role in the recent settlement reached with Olive.
Back when the CWC was set up after the signing of a Governor’s office-brokered Memorandum of Agreement in 1997, a special account was set up with New York City funds to pay the costs for defending tax assessment challenges made by the City against municipalities within the City’s watershed region. Although there are still ten different challenges pending, Olive’s battle had nearly depleted that account.
A call to one of the remaining assessment battles, Hurley supervisor Gary Bellows, resulted in the news that a recent April 9 court hearing on their case ended with the judge hearing both summations and sending both parties back to their drawing boards for another 60 days of finalizing work.
“We’ve been told there’ll be no decision before June or July,” said Bellows this week. “We won’t have any more news on the issue until then.”
At the CWC meeting, meanwhile, Rosa and other watershed representatives insisted that the talks they’d been holding were totally confidential, much in the same way talks had been back in were back in the mid-1990s when a host of local representatives met under former Governor George Pataki to reach the MOA deal they all signed in 1997.
Dennis Lucas, the Town of Hunter supervisor who serves as Executive Director of the Coalition of Watershed Towns, whose fight over proposed New York City regulations led to the creation of the MOA and CWC, noted in a separate interview that the impetus for the current talks, and resulting new atmosphere, came after he reached out to “the governor’s people and other state regulators” last year to address concerns about fraying upstate/downstate relations.
He said the big push came after the federal Environmental Protection Agency okayed a ten year Filtration Avoidance Determination for the City, sparking a lawsuit and other threats from the Coalition and other Upstate entities worried that the length of time of the new approvals would eat into their negotiating power.
Late last fall, Lucas continued, Tierney - knowledgeable about Catskills issues since dealing with the Belleayre Resort review in his previous job - was given the role of leading talks… and allowed to use a sizable staff to help move things along. Since January, parties involved in the ongoing talks have included various DEC officials, the Governor’s Secretary of the Environment Judith Enck, city DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd and Deputy Commissioner Paul Rush, and representatives from the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, representing the region’s environmental interests.
“From these discussions much progress has been made,” Lucas said, noting that in addition to tax assessment battles, items being mulled over include giving Upstate entities approval power regarding City land acquisitions within the watershed, increased recreation uses for city lands, including those around its reservoirs, and new investment mechanisms for the region. “We’re moving back towards an equal partnership bent on serving our shared constituents… We just had to recognize once again that we’re all in this together.”
Asked whether there was any relationship between the state’s new attitude towards the Catskills watershed region and the Agreement in Principal regarding the controversial Belleayre Resort that Spitzer announced and signed in Kingston last September, Lucas said no, not at all. He said the only time the Coalition of Watershed Towns touched on the Gitter proposal, now grown more controversial as it involves new state investment in its own ski center adjacent to the resort complex, was when its review process raised issues involving community character that Lucas and others in the entity felt were better left to “home rule” decisions by individual towns.
“It’s my belief that if one town wants to paint itself green and go to hell in a handbasket, they have a right to do so, within reason,” he said. “That’s part of the character of the Catskills.”
“I’m just tickled pink to see everyone willing to sit down together and critique our partnership, renew commitments to work together, and move forward,” Lucas said. “We’re doing okay.”
Leifeld, for his part, spoke about the “new attitude of cooperation” also including $500,000 in Smart Growth funds committed by the state to projects in the Route 28 corridor from Olive to Andes, and possibly being more tied into “the Dean Gitter thing” than Lucas wanted to admit.
“I’m not privy to the meetings,” he said. “But I’m happy they’re happening.”
He also offered that a relationship between the new talks and the AIP did exist in the way the new administration, through two governors now, has placed emphasis on developing the Hudson Valley as a “green corridor” similar to what Silicon Valley was for the digital age, and bettering relationships, and opportunities, within the Catskills.
“It’s big stuff,” he said. “For them to agree to leave us alone for ten years… that’s something!”