Unfinished Business (The Takeaway)

Although President Obama has officially ended the War on Iraq and is in the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, for many veterans, the war is far from over.  It is estimated that 350,000 veterans of these two wars will return home with PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This disorder will not only make it difficult for them to readjust to civilian life, but oftentimes leads to destructive and violent criminal behavior.  Since the Vietnam War, courts have viewed PTSD as a legitimate criminal defense. But as these overseas wars draw to a close and more veterans return home, the consequences of the disorder will become more and more prevalent throughout the United States. U.S. Courts could face an unprecedented influx of these cases.  Former Connecticut Supreme Court Judge Barry Schaller wrote about this in his book "Veterans On Trial: The Coming Court Battles Over PTSD." "In Iraq and Afghanistan, you have prolonged wars with multiple deployments, with everybody being exposed to combat, essentially," Schaller says. "It brings its own set of factors that produce mental stress at the level when it becomes a disorder."  PTSD is already used to make claims for medical and psychiatric services. Schaller calls the disorder a "mitigating factor" in cases where veterans are charged with crimes. He believes that Veterans' Affairs and other services needs to be more attentive to the needs of servicemen who return with PTSD.  A study by Army mental-health experts found that prescreening recruits for signs of susceptibility to PTSD and the harmful behaviors that it may trigger would benefit the U.S. military considerably. However, Schaller doubts the viability of such a program. "Screening has never been 100 percent effective," Schaller says. "Frankly, when a war goes on, the needs begin to outrun the screening that is taking place." Mental health standards are reduced as the need for troops increases.   There is a change towards the positive in regards to the stigma around PTSD. "The military culture has adjusted to the problem, [and] is more accepting," Schaller says. What the military should institute, the judge believes, is a training program for soldiers' re-entry into society, comparable in duration to basic military training.  "We should really look to our veterans with all their training and education, their experience to be leaders and model citizens. They are, after all, law abiding people who go through an experience that changes them in some ways, and causes them problems. I don't think it's enough that they just recover. I think that that's setting the bar too low in a sense." 

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, a law that expanded the government's powers of surveillance and intelligence-gathering. While Sen. Ron Wyden voted for the Act in 2001, he has since changed his mind. In 2006, Sen. Wyden was one of the few lawmakers who voted against the Act's reauthorization. In 2011, Sen. Wyden spoke against the Act on the Senate floor, saying, "The Patriot Act was passed a decade ago during a period of understandable fear, understandable fear having suffered in our nation the greatest terrorist attack in our history." Wyden continued, "Now is the time to revisit this, revisit it and ensure that a better job is done of striking that balance between fighting terror and protecting individual liberty." After many months of bureaucratic wrangling, Sen. Wyden has been granted permission to share some information about secret intelligence gathering under the Obama Administration. According to the Senator, the National Security Agency under President Obama has violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure.  "In effect, [this entails] searching through a pile of communications that are collected without a warrant to deliberately search for the phone calls or emails of specific Americans," Wyden says. "I understand that that may sometimes happen by accident, but I don't think the government should be doing this on purpose without getting a warrant or emergency authorization on the American that they are looking for. That's what I'm concerned about." "Of course, the government has not admitted whether backdoor searches have actually been conducted or not. There is a loophole in the law, and that's what I want to close." What really concerns Wyden is that the executive branch's interpretation of the Patriot Act may differ considerably from how the public believes the law to work.  "What I believe the American people need to know is that very often, the laws that they read when they go online, they believe that that public law is actually how the law is being interpreted, I am of the view that that's not the case," Wyden says. "There is a significant gap between what the public believes the stated law is and the secret interpretation that is been made by the executive branch."  The Senator calls the balance between national security and civil rights a "teeter-totter." "I think that when you have the government acknowledging in a declassified context that there has been a violation of 4th Amendment privacy protections, that's an indication that the constitutional teeter-totter is out of whack," he says.   

One of President Obama's main promises during the 2008 campaign was the closure of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Almost four years later, however, the facility still remains open, and its prisoners are still incarcerated.  Carol Rosenberg, correspondent at the Miami Herald, has been at the forefront of all the news from Guantanamo Bay. "There's 168 men down there," she says. "Only four of them have been convicted."  The small number of convictions does not mean that the facility is full of prisoners who have been proven guilty, however. "The Obama administration, using Bush administration analyses, has said that about 80 of these men can go as soon as they can secure agreements to safely put them somewhere," Rosenberg says. As for the men who are awaiting trial for crimes such as the September 11 attacks and the USS Cole bombing in 2003, the mechanisms for the trials and possible capital punishments are not even currently in place. Five men, including Khalid Sheik Mohamed, will face the death penalty if convicted. "There isn't even a method of execution. Under the law that Congress passed and created to do military commissions at Guantanamo, the Secretary of Defense will decide the system by which somebody would be put to death." Rosenberg has asked the administration about Secretary Leon Panetta's plans to implement a system, but has not received any definitive answers.  "It sort of shows what a work in progress military commissions are," Rosenberg says. "Somewhere down the road, some lawyer will probably [be assigned] to figure it out."

In 2003, Sabrina De Sousa was working as an undercover CIA operative in Milan when an Egyptian terrorist suspect, Muslim cleric Abu Omar, was abducted and flown to Egypt, where he says he was tortured and interrogated. Years later, several Americans, including De Sousa, were indicted in Italy and found guilty in absentia for kidnapping. Others were granted diplomatic immunity, but De Sousa was not and she was sentenced to five years in prison. Since the incident, De Sousa has claimed she had nothing to do with the kidnapping. On Friday, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome will convene for a two-day hearing to decide whether to uphold or overturn the conviction. Mark Zaid, national security attorney, is representing De Sousa.