Supreme Court Rules Guantanamo Detainees Have Habeas Rights
ABA Journal, IL -
By Debra Cassens Weiss The US Supreme Court has delivered a stunning defeat to the Bush administration in a ruling that gives detainees at Guantanamo Bay a ...
Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts
By DAVID STOUT 12:10 PM ET The Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that the Guantánamo Bay detainees had adequate protections under a 2005 law.
Load em on a bus, give them a box of razor blades, and deliver the whole mob to the Supreme Court building in DC. Let them decide what to do with them then.
QUOTE(Marine @ Jun 12 2008, 02:17 PM) 
Load em on a bus, give them a box of razor blades, and deliver the whole mob to the Supreme Court building in DC. Let them decide what to do with them then.
This from one sworn to defend the Constitution... just like the Supreme Court just did.
Of course there is the "Constitution is a piece of toilet paper" camp....
June 13, 2008
Editorial
Justice 5, Brutality 4
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label “unlawful enemy combatants” and throw into never-ending detention.
Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.
The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush’s attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.
The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees’ habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.
In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.
Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees’ habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.
The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees’ cases — the administration’s weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.
It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as “most fundamentally a procedural right.” Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such “generous” protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.
There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.
Editorial
Justice 5, Brutality 4
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label “unlawful enemy combatants” and throw into never-ending detention.
Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.
The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush’s attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.
The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees’ habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.
In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.
Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees’ habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.
The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees’ cases — the administration’s weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.
It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as “most fundamentally a procedural right.” Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such “generous” protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.
There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.
Marine:
I find it amazing that you can be a student of the Constitution and yet defend the positon of the minority in these cases...
This is a nation of laws.
These minority justices should know that.
A nation of laws you have taken an oath to protect and defend.
This case stands for the rule of law.
No one. Not the Congress and not the President are above this law.
Only the people can change that law, and they have not acted to do so.
No matter how small or insignificant, a right that has been accorded someone is a right that they hold.
The minority opinion is shameful.
Security, with liberty intact
Posted by Star-Ledger editorial board June 12, 2008 10:30PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled yet again that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to challenge their imprisonment before a federal judge. This decision is remarkable -- not because it is so clearly a reproach to the Bush administration's policies and not because it represents an obnoxious judicial power grab, as Justice Antonin Scalia and other dissenters insist.
Rather, the 5-4 ruling will stand out in history because Justice Anthony Kennedy managed to sum up the lasting power of our system of government and the hope of all Americans in two simple, powerful sentences:
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law."
Kennedy and four other justices recognized that the right to challenge one's imprisonment before a neutral judge is fundamental to that framework and to liberty. That right, known as habeas corpus, is a crucial check on abuses by a president or Congress that might be inclined, as Kennedy succinctly put it, to switch the Constitution on or off at will.
The Bush administration has been doing its best for almost seven years to jam the switch in the off position.
The Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the military and the White House have used brute force, convoluted logic and outright deception to carry out and justify indefinite imprisonment, waterboarding and other torture, warrantless wiretapping and a host of other violations of civil rights. They have tried to argue that Guantanamo is somehow beyond the reach of the Constitution because the U.S. in a 1903 lease included some boilerplate wording acknowledging that the soil there belongs to Cuba.
Kennedy and the majority properly recognized that substance triumphs over form. The U.S. military has controlled Guantanamo totally and without interruption for more than 100 years, never mind the lease's wording. Whether an American jail happens to sit there or in Manhattan is immaterial.
Still, it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the dissent by Scalia and another by Chief Justice John Roberts as meaningless, conservative ranting.
Their contention that giving detainees access to the federal courts will guarantee more American deaths by terrorists is misguided, but it reflects a genuine fear for the nation's safety. Scalia is correct when he notes that al Qaeda and other enemies are determined to strike us whenever and wherever they can.
Legitimate wariness is warranted to meet a very real danger. Degrading the ability of America's principles to meet the challenge is not.
In a war that, as Kennedy says, could well last a generation or more, it may be more difficult to properly reconcile liberty and security. But it is all the more important that we do so.
I find it amazing that you can be a student of the Constitution and yet defend the positon of the minority in these cases...
This is a nation of laws.
These minority justices should know that.
A nation of laws you have taken an oath to protect and defend.
This case stands for the rule of law.
No one. Not the Congress and not the President are above this law.
Only the people can change that law, and they have not acted to do so.
No matter how small or insignificant, a right that has been accorded someone is a right that they hold.
The minority opinion is shameful.
Security, with liberty intact
Posted by Star-Ledger editorial board June 12, 2008 10:30PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled yet again that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to challenge their imprisonment before a federal judge. This decision is remarkable -- not because it is so clearly a reproach to the Bush administration's policies and not because it represents an obnoxious judicial power grab, as Justice Antonin Scalia and other dissenters insist.
Rather, the 5-4 ruling will stand out in history because Justice Anthony Kennedy managed to sum up the lasting power of our system of government and the hope of all Americans in two simple, powerful sentences:
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law."
Kennedy and four other justices recognized that the right to challenge one's imprisonment before a neutral judge is fundamental to that framework and to liberty. That right, known as habeas corpus, is a crucial check on abuses by a president or Congress that might be inclined, as Kennedy succinctly put it, to switch the Constitution on or off at will.
The Bush administration has been doing its best for almost seven years to jam the switch in the off position.
The Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the military and the White House have used brute force, convoluted logic and outright deception to carry out and justify indefinite imprisonment, waterboarding and other torture, warrantless wiretapping and a host of other violations of civil rights. They have tried to argue that Guantanamo is somehow beyond the reach of the Constitution because the U.S. in a 1903 lease included some boilerplate wording acknowledging that the soil there belongs to Cuba.
Kennedy and the majority properly recognized that substance triumphs over form. The U.S. military has controlled Guantanamo totally and without interruption for more than 100 years, never mind the lease's wording. Whether an American jail happens to sit there or in Manhattan is immaterial.
Still, it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the dissent by Scalia and another by Chief Justice John Roberts as meaningless, conservative ranting.
Their contention that giving detainees access to the federal courts will guarantee more American deaths by terrorists is misguided, but it reflects a genuine fear for the nation's safety. Scalia is correct when he notes that al Qaeda and other enemies are determined to strike us whenever and wherever they can.
Legitimate wariness is warranted to meet a very real danger. Degrading the ability of America's principles to meet the challenge is not.
In a war that, as Kennedy says, could well last a generation or more, it may be more difficult to properly reconcile liberty and security. But it is all the more important that we do so.
The court fulfills its duty to the Constitution
Friday, June 13, 2008
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/farmer/in....xml&coll=1
The clash between the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush administration over the treatment of suspected terrorists was inevitable in light of their differing, even competing, constitutional responsibilities.
For liberals, President Bush's treatment of the Guantánamo detainees is the worst sort of authoritarian, Third World justice -- no charges, no trial, unending confinement. But looked at from Bush's viewpoint, he was doing only what his oath of office required. Of all the responsibilities imposed on a president, none exceeds the obligation to protect the American people.
Indeed, any president found to have neglected or shortchanged that obligation would expose himself to impeachment -- by popular demand. Bush did what he thought he had to do.
But the Supreme Court has obligations of its own, none greater than to protect basic constitutional rights. This especially includes the right of those arrested or detained to be brought before a competent court, apprised of the charges faced and afforded adequate counsel. It's what lawyers call habeas corpus, a Latin term for "deliver the body." (Lawyers like Latin; makes them seem smarter.)
Though conservatives sometimes seem to forget it, the justices serve something even more important than a transitory electorate or the popular passions of the moment. They serve as guardians of the Constitution, an instrument that, at bottom, is designed to protect ordinary people against the tyranny of government and the minority against the tyranny of the majority.
And that's essentially what the high court did in rejecting as a violation of the Constitution Bush's treatment of those detained at Gitmo indefinitely without judicial review. Like Bush, the court majority did what it thought it had to do.
It was an instructive exercise in the separation of powers, something fundamental to American democracy but too often overlooked by administrations seeking to expand presidential power.
The pros and cons of the ruling will be debated for some time, even providing potential fodder for our endless presidential campaign. For a layman, it's hard to tell who's right or wrong legally. But if you're someone with a healthy suspicion of all government -- not just when it serves a liberal or conservative viewpoint -- the language of Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority decision is appealing.
He concedes that the fight against terrorism is different and imposes new and difficult choices in the field of national security. Even so, he writes, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law." Always thought that was the case. But it's nice to hear it said.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in dissent, took the view that the court majority was insufficiently respectful of Congress and the president. (He should look more closely at the polls if he wants to see some real disrespect for Bush and Congress.)
Roberts believes it's best to stick with the Bush-Congress plan for military tribunals where, unlike in American civilian courts, defendants would not be entitled to see all the evidence available to the prosecution.
It's the kind of court that Judge Roy Bean of the old west might like, or King George III. But it's apparently all right with Roberts.
The "threshold question," Roberts writes, "is whether the system the political branches designed protects whatever rights the detainees may possess. If so, there is no need for any additional process, whether called 'habeas' or something else." But, of course, it's clear from Roberts' opinion that he doesn't think the detainees, some in the slammer for almost six years, have any rights.
Kennedy addresses Roberts' beef this way: "Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers." Couldn't have said it better myself.
No review of a Supreme Court decision would be complete without some input from Justice Antonin Scalia. He's entertaining to listen to and a writer with a sharp pen and lots of style. He'd probably be the best guy on the court to have a beer with. But there are times when he seems to lose it -- as in yesterday's dissent when he said of the majority decision, "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."
It was a cheap shot. I thought he was better than that.
John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com. To comment on his column, go to NJVoices.com.
Friday, June 13, 2008
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/farmer/in....xml&coll=1
The clash between the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush administration over the treatment of suspected terrorists was inevitable in light of their differing, even competing, constitutional responsibilities.
For liberals, President Bush's treatment of the Guantánamo detainees is the worst sort of authoritarian, Third World justice -- no charges, no trial, unending confinement. But looked at from Bush's viewpoint, he was doing only what his oath of office required. Of all the responsibilities imposed on a president, none exceeds the obligation to protect the American people.
Indeed, any president found to have neglected or shortchanged that obligation would expose himself to impeachment -- by popular demand. Bush did what he thought he had to do.
But the Supreme Court has obligations of its own, none greater than to protect basic constitutional rights. This especially includes the right of those arrested or detained to be brought before a competent court, apprised of the charges faced and afforded adequate counsel. It's what lawyers call habeas corpus, a Latin term for "deliver the body." (Lawyers like Latin; makes them seem smarter.)
Though conservatives sometimes seem to forget it, the justices serve something even more important than a transitory electorate or the popular passions of the moment. They serve as guardians of the Constitution, an instrument that, at bottom, is designed to protect ordinary people against the tyranny of government and the minority against the tyranny of the majority.
And that's essentially what the high court did in rejecting as a violation of the Constitution Bush's treatment of those detained at Gitmo indefinitely without judicial review. Like Bush, the court majority did what it thought it had to do.
It was an instructive exercise in the separation of powers, something fundamental to American democracy but too often overlooked by administrations seeking to expand presidential power.
The pros and cons of the ruling will be debated for some time, even providing potential fodder for our endless presidential campaign. For a layman, it's hard to tell who's right or wrong legally. But if you're someone with a healthy suspicion of all government -- not just when it serves a liberal or conservative viewpoint -- the language of Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority decision is appealing.
He concedes that the fight against terrorism is different and imposes new and difficult choices in the field of national security. Even so, he writes, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law." Always thought that was the case. But it's nice to hear it said.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in dissent, took the view that the court majority was insufficiently respectful of Congress and the president. (He should look more closely at the polls if he wants to see some real disrespect for Bush and Congress.)
Roberts believes it's best to stick with the Bush-Congress plan for military tribunals where, unlike in American civilian courts, defendants would not be entitled to see all the evidence available to the prosecution.
It's the kind of court that Judge Roy Bean of the old west might like, or King George III. But it's apparently all right with Roberts.
The "threshold question," Roberts writes, "is whether the system the political branches designed protects whatever rights the detainees may possess. If so, there is no need for any additional process, whether called 'habeas' or something else." But, of course, it's clear from Roberts' opinion that he doesn't think the detainees, some in the slammer for almost six years, have any rights.
Kennedy addresses Roberts' beef this way: "Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers." Couldn't have said it better myself.
No review of a Supreme Court decision would be complete without some input from Justice Antonin Scalia. He's entertaining to listen to and a writer with a sharp pen and lots of style. He'd probably be the best guy on the court to have a beer with. But there are times when he seems to lose it -- as in yesterday's dissent when he said of the majority decision, "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."
It was a cheap shot. I thought he was better than that.
John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com. To comment on his column, go to NJVoices.com.
Posted on Sun, Jun. 15, 2008
America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: June 14, 2008 10:50:09 PM
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."
The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two acts of Congress that codified it.
One former administration official said the White House's initial policy and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ... My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don't apply ... certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off, this isn't a Geneva world anymore."
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," the statement said.
LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.
The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.
"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.
He didn't want his name used, partly because he didn't want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.
"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the Americans were taking action without checking this information."
Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.
By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who'd had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.
Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.
Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
"Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban," he said in a phone interview.
Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.
"It's all about developing the mosaic ... there's value to both ends of the spectrum," he said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.
Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command "rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement," said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO."
'WAR COUNCIL' REWRITES DETAINEE LAW
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
"He said that we're not getting anything, and his thought was that we're not getting anything because there might not be anything to get," said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps at the time.
Many detainees were "swept up in the pot" by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who's now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.
One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.
Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."
"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired."
A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.
" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said. "Are you kidding me?"
"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said. "That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.
In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered "high value" for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department's head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005.
"Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated," said Waxman, who's now a law professor at Columbia University.
At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question after the high court's ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are."
HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/259/v-print/story/38773.html
America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: June 14, 2008 10:50:09 PM
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."
The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two acts of Congress that codified it.
One former administration official said the White House's initial policy and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ... My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don't apply ... certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off, this isn't a Geneva world anymore."
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," the statement said.
LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.
The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.
"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.
He didn't want his name used, partly because he didn't want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.
"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the Americans were taking action without checking this information."
Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.
By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who'd had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.
Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.
Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
"Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban," he said in a phone interview.
Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.
"It's all about developing the mosaic ... there's value to both ends of the spectrum," he said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.
Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command "rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement," said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO."
'WAR COUNCIL' REWRITES DETAINEE LAW
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
"He said that we're not getting anything, and his thought was that we're not getting anything because there might not be anything to get," said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps at the time.
Many detainees were "swept up in the pot" by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who's now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.
One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.
Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."
"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired."
A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.
" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said. "Are you kidding me?"
"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said. "That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.
In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered "high value" for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department's head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005.
"Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated," said Waxman, who's now a law professor at Columbia University.
At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question after the high court's ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are."
HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/259/v-print/story/38773.html
I wonder if McCain and his brethren in the Hanoi Hilton would have liked to have been able to avail themselves of the habeas corpus provisions if they were present in a North Vietnamese Constitution?
McCain Takes Gitmo Ruling Personally
June 15, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS) John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told a crowd of supporters in New Jersey Friday that the Supreme Court’s latest Guantanamo Bay ruling is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Why would the normally stoic senator become so hyperbolic about a ruling that, at its essence, strengthens the vitality of the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus - a bedrock constitutional right?
There are several reasons. As a political matter, McCain clearly understands that in his quest to enchant the hard-right wing of the Grand Old Party, he must rail upon the Supreme Court whenever it happens to disagree with the Bush Administration on legal aspects of the war on terrorism.
This is why, just a few weeks ago, McCain delivered a speech that hammered the federal judiciary, sweeping away any lingering notion that he intends to govern as a moderate on legal policy and priorities.
So, whether or not McCain really believes what he says, it is good politics (read: inaccurate and unfair) to declare that the Court just sided with the terrorists over the President when five Justices ruled that the terror suspects detained in Cuba may challenge their detentions in our civilian courts.
And it is good politics to warn of the detainees clogging those courts with frivolous lawsuits - like current domestic prisoners do - even though the suspects so far only have sought to have some sort of objective, neutral fact-finder evaluate the government’s classification of them as “enemy combatants.”
The main reason for McCain’s strong language, however, is as personal as political.
Following the last Supreme Court ruling on this topic, which also struck down stubborn Administration detainee policies, the Senator (a Vietnam torture victim himself) invested no small amount of his own treasured (and well-earned) historical capital to try to broker a deal on the detainees.
And, in late 2006, he did.
It’s called the Military Commissions Act. It was a terrible idea from the very beginning, and it was one of two federal statutes undercut by the Justices last Thursday. It’s no wonder the nominee is taking the defeat personally.
After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.
Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law that just might have passed its constitutional test this term.
McCain’s sell-out on the torture language is not the reason the Justices declared the MCA unconstitutional. It is not the reason why the detainees now have more access to federal courts than they did before. But it is emblematic of the larger and much more destructive, seven-year-long sell-out of the legislative branch in the legal fight against terrorism.
And that emblem, thanks to the Supreme Court, now has John McCain’s face on it just in time for the run-up to the general election.
This is not necessarily fair. It’s not just John McCain who failed or refused to do the right thing. Last week’s ruling was the fourth defeat in a row for the Administration at the Supreme Court. And on the past three occasions the Congress has responded not by embracing the hints and clues left by the Court’s majorities - by, say, brokering a desperately-needed deal between executive and judicial branches over a terror law policy - but by siding with the White House.
McCain and other so-called “moderates” have had the power for years to avoid these Supreme Court showdowns and show-ups. They just haven’t had the political courage to exercise that power.
All of which means the Supreme Court isn’t the only reason why the terror detainees remain in legal limbo. The White House is to blame for pushing beyond the legal limits of executive power. And the Congress is to blame for allowing it to happen despite entreaties by the judiciary for help.
If I were a good man like McCain, I’d be embarrassed by this. And perhaps he is. And perhaps that embarrassment is expressing itself in anger instead of consideration. In any case, it’s misguided.
Contrary to the angry candidate’s remarks, last week’s Boumediene ruling is not on a par with the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that tagged slaves as “property;” its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine; or its Korematsu v. United States decision that affirmed the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In fact, the recent ruling on detainee rights will be revered, not reviled, by future generations, who will study the first decade following the terror attacks on America with a curious mix of regret and sadness about lost opportunities, legal and otherwise, that hampered our collective response.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/15/...le4181781.shtml
McCain Takes Gitmo Ruling Personally
June 15, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS) John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told a crowd of supporters in New Jersey Friday that the Supreme Court’s latest Guantanamo Bay ruling is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Why would the normally stoic senator become so hyperbolic about a ruling that, at its essence, strengthens the vitality of the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus - a bedrock constitutional right?
There are several reasons. As a political matter, McCain clearly understands that in his quest to enchant the hard-right wing of the Grand Old Party, he must rail upon the Supreme Court whenever it happens to disagree with the Bush Administration on legal aspects of the war on terrorism.
This is why, just a few weeks ago, McCain delivered a speech that hammered the federal judiciary, sweeping away any lingering notion that he intends to govern as a moderate on legal policy and priorities.
So, whether or not McCain really believes what he says, it is good politics (read: inaccurate and unfair) to declare that the Court just sided with the terrorists over the President when five Justices ruled that the terror suspects detained in Cuba may challenge their detentions in our civilian courts.
And it is good politics to warn of the detainees clogging those courts with frivolous lawsuits - like current domestic prisoners do - even though the suspects so far only have sought to have some sort of objective, neutral fact-finder evaluate the government’s classification of them as “enemy combatants.”
The main reason for McCain’s strong language, however, is as personal as political.
Following the last Supreme Court ruling on this topic, which also struck down stubborn Administration detainee policies, the Senator (a Vietnam torture victim himself) invested no small amount of his own treasured (and well-earned) historical capital to try to broker a deal on the detainees.
And, in late 2006, he did.
It’s called the Military Commissions Act. It was a terrible idea from the very beginning, and it was one of two federal statutes undercut by the Justices last Thursday. It’s no wonder the nominee is taking the defeat personally.
After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.
Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law that just might have passed its constitutional test this term.
McCain’s sell-out on the torture language is not the reason the Justices declared the MCA unconstitutional. It is not the reason why the detainees now have more access to federal courts than they did before. But it is emblematic of the larger and much more destructive, seven-year-long sell-out of the legislative branch in the legal fight against terrorism.
And that emblem, thanks to the Supreme Court, now has John McCain’s face on it just in time for the run-up to the general election.
This is not necessarily fair. It’s not just John McCain who failed or refused to do the right thing. Last week’s ruling was the fourth defeat in a row for the Administration at the Supreme Court. And on the past three occasions the Congress has responded not by embracing the hints and clues left by the Court’s majorities - by, say, brokering a desperately-needed deal between executive and judicial branches over a terror law policy - but by siding with the White House.
McCain and other so-called “moderates” have had the power for years to avoid these Supreme Court showdowns and show-ups. They just haven’t had the political courage to exercise that power.
All of which means the Supreme Court isn’t the only reason why the terror detainees remain in legal limbo. The White House is to blame for pushing beyond the legal limits of executive power. And the Congress is to blame for allowing it to happen despite entreaties by the judiciary for help.
If I were a good man like McCain, I’d be embarrassed by this. And perhaps he is. And perhaps that embarrassment is expressing itself in anger instead of consideration. In any case, it’s misguided.
Contrary to the angry candidate’s remarks, last week’s Boumediene ruling is not on a par with the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that tagged slaves as “property;” its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine; or its Korematsu v. United States decision that affirmed the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In fact, the recent ruling on detainee rights will be revered, not reviled, by future generations, who will study the first decade following the terror attacks on America with a curious mix of regret and sadness about lost opportunities, legal and otherwise, that hampered our collective response.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/15/...le4181781.shtml
General Accuses WH of War Crimes
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; 12:44 PM
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.
In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.
Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.
The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.
"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Pamela Hess of the Associated Press has more on the report, which resulted from "the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far" and "found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders."
The War Council
So if war crimes were committed, who's responsible?
In today's installment of a major McClatchy Newspapers series on the U.S. detention system, Tom Lasseter writes: "The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
"It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.
"The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.
"The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the 'War Council,' drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone -- from soldiers on the ground to the president -- from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. . . .
"The international conventions that the United States helped draft, and to which it's a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another's offices. No one in the War Council has publicly described the group's activities in any detail, and only some of their opinions and memorandums have been made public. . . .
"Only one of the five War Council lawyers remains in office: David Addington, the brilliant but abrasive longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney. His primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn't check."
The other members were Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales.
For more on Addington's central role, see my Sept. 5, 2007 column; for more on the relationship between the administration's legal memos and torture, see my April 2 column.
The Senate Investigation
The Senate Armed Services Committee made news with a hearing yesterday -- part of its continuing investigation into the administration's interrogation policies. (Here's the C-SPAN video.)
Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.
"Torture 'is basically subject to perception,' CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. 'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.' . . .
"Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding." . . .
"Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: 'How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?'."
Levin also introduced evidence that proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law. Warrick writes: "Among them was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force. He warned in an October 2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would 'shock the conscience of any legal body' that might review how the interrogations were conducted.
"'This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,' Fallon wrote. He added: 'Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.'"
The star witness yesterday was Haynes -- the former Pentagon general counsel, "War Council" member and Addington protege.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times that Haynes "sparred at length with senators seeking to pin on him some responsibility for the harsh tactics and the worldwide outrage they provoked.
"Documents released Tuesday show that some of Mr. Haynes's aides in July 2002 sought out information about aggressive interrogations.
"Mr. Haynes fended off attacks by Democrats and some Republicans, noting that the Defense Department has 10,000 lawyers and saying he had no time to conduct legal research himself on which methods were permitted.
"Moreover, Mr. Haynes said, 'as the lawyer, I was not the decision maker. I was the adviser.'
"Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he thought Mr. Haynes's advice had led American soldiers drastically astray. 'You degraded the integrity of the United States military,' Mr. Reed said."
Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday's Senate appearance by the Pentagon's former top lawyer.
"William 'Jim' Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee. . .
"It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility.
"A committee investigation found that, contrary to his earlier testimony, Haynes had showed strong interest in potentially abusive questioning methods as early as July 2002. Later, ignoring the strong objections of the uniformed military, Haynes sent a memo to Donald Rumsfeld recommending the approval of stress positions, nudity, dogs and light deprivation. . . .
"Haynes mixed his forgetfulness with a dash of insolence. He suggested to [Claire] McCaskill [(D-Mo.)] that 'it's important that you understand how the Defense Department works.' He cut off [Jack] Reed [(D-R.I.)] with a 'Let me finish, Senator!' and disclosed that he had been too busy to give more attention to the Geneva Conventions: 'I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions made every day. This was one.'"
Mark Benjamin of Salon offers up a timeline based on the Senate investigation. He writes that "as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture.
Phil Carter analyzes the new evidence on washingtonpost.com
Adam Zagorin writes for Time: "Despite years of investigation into alleged abuse and death of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9/11, the only Americans held accountable have been the low-ranking 'bad apples' convicted for the worst atrocities at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. No official blame has been assigned to higher-ups for abuses at Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, much less for crimes allegedly committed by U.S. personnel in various secret CIA prisons around the world."
Tim Rutten writes in his Los Angeles Times opinion column: "Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States."
Rutten writes that, along with earlier revelations, "the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of 'the unitary executive,' which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials."
Rutten, however, has nothing but scorn for the "handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics" who are calling for criminal indictments or war-crime trials.
The White House Line
White House spokesman Tony Fratto repeated the official administration position yesterday: "I'm telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government. The policy of this government has been to take these detainees and to interrogate them and get the information that we can get to help protect this country, which we have been very successful at doing, and we've been very successful at getting the information that has saved lives and prevented attacks on this country and on our allies. . . .
"[W]e do not abuse and we treat detainees humanely and comporting with the law."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1801546_pf.html
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; 12:44 PM
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.
In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.
Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.
The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.
"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Pamela Hess of the Associated Press has more on the report, which resulted from "the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far" and "found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders."
The War Council
So if war crimes were committed, who's responsible?
In today's installment of a major McClatchy Newspapers series on the U.S. detention system, Tom Lasseter writes: "The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
"It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.
"The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.
"The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the 'War Council,' drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone -- from soldiers on the ground to the president -- from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. . . .
"The international conventions that the United States helped draft, and to which it's a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another's offices. No one in the War Council has publicly described the group's activities in any detail, and only some of their opinions and memorandums have been made public. . . .
"Only one of the five War Council lawyers remains in office: David Addington, the brilliant but abrasive longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney. His primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn't check."
The other members were Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales.
For more on Addington's central role, see my Sept. 5, 2007 column; for more on the relationship between the administration's legal memos and torture, see my April 2 column.
The Senate Investigation
The Senate Armed Services Committee made news with a hearing yesterday -- part of its continuing investigation into the administration's interrogation policies. (Here's the C-SPAN video.)
Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.
"Torture 'is basically subject to perception,' CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. 'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.' . . .
"Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding." . . .
"Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: 'How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?'."
Levin also introduced evidence that proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law. Warrick writes: "Among them was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force. He warned in an October 2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would 'shock the conscience of any legal body' that might review how the interrogations were conducted.
"'This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,' Fallon wrote. He added: 'Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.'"
The star witness yesterday was Haynes -- the former Pentagon general counsel, "War Council" member and Addington protege.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times that Haynes "sparred at length with senators seeking to pin on him some responsibility for the harsh tactics and the worldwide outrage they provoked.
"Documents released Tuesday show that some of Mr. Haynes's aides in July 2002 sought out information about aggressive interrogations.
"Mr. Haynes fended off attacks by Democrats and some Republicans, noting that the Defense Department has 10,000 lawyers and saying he had no time to conduct legal research himself on which methods were permitted.
"Moreover, Mr. Haynes said, 'as the lawyer, I was not the decision maker. I was the adviser.'
"Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he thought Mr. Haynes's advice had led American soldiers drastically astray. 'You degraded the integrity of the United States military,' Mr. Reed said."
Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday's Senate appearance by the Pentagon's former top lawyer.
"William 'Jim' Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee. . .
"It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility.
"A committee investigation found that, contrary to his earlier testimony, Haynes had showed strong interest in potentially abusive questioning methods as early as July 2002. Later, ignoring the strong objections of the uniformed military, Haynes sent a memo to Donald Rumsfeld recommending the approval of stress positions, nudity, dogs and light deprivation. . . .
"Haynes mixed his forgetfulness with a dash of insolence. He suggested to [Claire] McCaskill [(D-Mo.)] that 'it's important that you understand how the Defense Department works.' He cut off [Jack] Reed [(D-R.I.)] with a 'Let me finish, Senator!' and disclosed that he had been too busy to give more attention to the Geneva Conventions: 'I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions made every day. This was one.'"
Mark Benjamin of Salon offers up a timeline based on the Senate investigation. He writes that "as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture.
Phil Carter analyzes the new evidence on washingtonpost.com
Adam Zagorin writes for Time: "Despite years of investigation into alleged abuse and death of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9/11, the only Americans held accountable have been the low-ranking 'bad apples' convicted for the worst atrocities at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. No official blame has been assigned to higher-ups for abuses at Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, much less for crimes allegedly committed by U.S. personnel in various secret CIA prisons around the world."
Tim Rutten writes in his Los Angeles Times opinion column: "Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States."
Rutten writes that, along with earlier revelations, "the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of 'the unitary executive,' which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials."
Rutten, however, has nothing but scorn for the "handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics" who are calling for criminal indictments or war-crime trials.
The White House Line
White House spokesman Tony Fratto repeated the official administration position yesterday: "I'm telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government. The policy of this government has been to take these detainees and to interrogate them and get the information that we can get to help protect this country, which we have been very successful at doing, and we've been very successful at getting the information that has saved lives and prevented attacks on this country and on our allies. . . .
"[W]e do not abuse and we treat detainees humanely and comporting with the law."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1801546_pf.html
Posted on Mon, Jun. 16, 2008
Abuse of detainees routine at U.S. bases in Afghanistan
By TOM LASSETER
McClatchy Newspapers
American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock.
The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.
Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.
The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.
"I was punched and kicked at Bagram. . . . At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead," said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. "But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law."
Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.
When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.
According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer.
The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.
Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.
Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.
In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who'd served as detention camp guards and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights reports.
The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss McClatchy's findings.
The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul. The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses.
New detainees were shoved to the floor of a cavernous warehouse, a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that stayed dim all day, and kept in pens where they weren't allowed to speak or look at guards.
The Afghan government initially based a group of intelligence officers at Bagram, but they were pushed out. Mohammed Arif Sarwari, the head of Afghanistan's national security directorate from late 2001 to 2003, said he got a letter from U.S. commanders in mid-2002 telling him to get his men out of Bagram.
Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were creating an island with no one to watch over them.
"I said I didn't want to be involved with what they were doing at Bagram — who they were arresting or what they were doing with them," he said in an interview in Kabul.
The rate of reported abuse was higher among men who were held at the U.S. camp at Kandahar Airfield. Thirty-two out of 42 men held there whom McClatchy interviewed claimed that they were knocked to the ground or slapped about. But former detainees said the violence at Bagram was much harsher.
The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.
Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.
Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."
After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they'd chained detainees' wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell.
"Frankly, it didn't look good," Maj. Jeff Bovarnick, the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003, said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005.
"This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head," Bovarnick continued. "The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply."
The only American officer who's been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring, who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.
Beiring told investigators that he'd received no formal training in leading a military police company, "just the correspondence courses and on-the-job training."
Then-Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, the Army lawyer who investigated Beiring in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, argued that: "The government failed to present any evidence of what are 'approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.' "
On Berg's recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand.
"It's extremely hard to wage war with so many undefined rules and roles," Beiring said in a phone interview with McClatchy. "It was very crazy."
The commander of the military intelligence section that worked alongside Beiring's military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn Wood, declined to comment.
The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand, admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.
Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar.
'EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE'
U.S. soldiers' testimony in military investigations after the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar suggested that detainee abuse at Bagram occurred from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, a period of about seven months.
Soldiers who served at Bagram before that time said detainees were never beaten. Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserves officer who worked there from December 2001 to April 2002, said in an interview that none of the soldiers or American operatives he knew had resorted to abusing detainees.
An Army interrogator who was based at Bagram in the spring of 2002 and later wrote a book under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey for security reasons, said in an e-mail exchange that while soldiers pushed the limits — such as using stress positions and sleep deprivation — he never saw or heard of detainees getting beaten.
Former detainees interviewed by McClatchy and by some human rights groups, however, claimed that the violence was rampant from late 2001 until the summer of 2003 or later, at least 20 months.
Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different languages, the 28 former detainees who told McClatchy that they'd been abused there told strikingly similar stories:
Bashir Ahmad, a Pakistani who fought with the Taliban, said that in the late spring or summer of 2003, U.S. troops would chain him to the ceiling by his hands or feet. "Then they would punch me or hit me with a wood rod," he said.
Brahim Yadel, a French citizen, said he was punched and slapped during interrogations at Bagram in December 2001.
Moazzem Begg, a British citizen, said he was assaulted regularly at Bagram for most of 2002, until he was transferred to Guantanamo in January 2003.
Akhtar Mohammed, an Afghan, said that at Bagram during the spring of 2003, "when they moved me to the interrogation room they covered my eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground. And when I fell down, they punched and kicked me."
Abdul Haleem, a Pakistani, said that U.S. soldiers threw him to the ground at Bagram in 2003 and kicked him in the head, "like they were playing soccer."
Adel al Zamel, a Kuwaiti, said guards frequently waved sticks at him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002. During an interview in Kuwait City, Zamel shook his head and said he remembered hearing detainees being beaten and "the cries from the interrogation room" at Bagram.
He wasn't the only person to report sexual humiliation.
Sgt. Selena Salcedo, a U.S. military intelligence officer, said that sometime between August 2002 and February 2003 she saw another interrogator, Pfc. Damien Corsetti, pull down the pants of a detainee and leave his genitals exposed.
In a 2005 sworn statement in the court-martial of Corsetti, she said she'd left the room and that when she'd returned the detainee was bent over a table and Corsetti was waving a plastic bottle near his buttocks. She said she didn't know whether the detainee had been raped.
Corsetti was acquitted of any wrongdoing. He didn't respond to a request for comment submitted through his attorney. Salcedo pleaded guilty to kicking a detainee — Dilawar — and grabbing his ears during a December 2002 interrogation.
Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in the summer of 2002 confirmed that detainees there were struck routinely.
"Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point," said Brian Cammack, a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati. He was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.
Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail.
"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.
Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down on detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
RETRIBUTION FOR 9-11
Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001."
When detainees first had their hoods removed on arriving at Bagram, looming behind them was a large American flag and insignia of the New York Police Department, a reminder of Sept. 11.
Almost none of the detainees at Bagram, however, had anything to do with the terrorist attacks.
Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who'd passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military's term for senior terrorist operatives.
That hardly mattered.
Khaled al Asmr, a tall, gaunt Jordanian, was hauled off a U.S. military cargo plane at Bagram in early 2002. Flown in from Pakistan in heavy shackles and with a hood on his head, he was accused of being an al Qaida operative with possible connections to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Standing in an interrogation room, Asmr said, he'd already been punched in the face several times by American guards. Two Americans walked into the room, wearing civilian clothes. They pulled out pistols and held them to either side of his head as a third American man entered and walked up to Asmr, according to his account.
The third man leaned toward Asmr's face and whispered, his breath warm, "I am here to save you from these people, but you must tell me you are al Qaida."
Asmr, who told his story to a McClatchy reporter in Jordan, was declared no longer an enemy combatant after a 2004 U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo. He said he'd known some al Qaida leaders, but that was more than 15 years earlier, during the U.S.-backed Afghan uprising against the Soviets.
Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said they'd heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous insurgent the U.S. said he was.
Gul's American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez, went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court filings — which included videotaped testimony by witnesses — and in an interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.
A LAWLESS PLACE
The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.
The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.
At Bagram, however, the rules didn't apply. In February 2002, President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum standard for humane treatment.
Without those parameters, it's difficult to say what acts were or were not war crimes, said Charles Garraway, a former colonel and legal adviser for the British army and a leading international expert on military law.
Bush's order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such rules under the military's basic law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that troops on the ground didn't know what was allowed.
In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
"I think it's completely predictable, because you no longer have standards," he said.
In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.
UNTRAINED, UNDISCIPLINED
The military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47, telling them they couldn't chain prisoners to doors or to the ceiling. They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said that humiliating detainees wasn't allowed.
Neither was applicable at Bagram, however, said Bovarnick, the former senior legal officer for the installation.
The military police rulebook saying that enemy prisoners of war should be treated humanely didn't apply, he said, because the detainees weren't prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration's decision to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees.
The military police guide for the Army correctional system, which prohibits "securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in emergencies," wasn't applicable, either, because Bagram wasn't a correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.
"I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that . . . either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs," enemy prisoners of war, Bovarnick said.
Compounding the problem, military police guards and interrogators lacked proper training and received little instruction from commanders about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during military investigations and interviews by McClatchy.
The guards who worked there from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003 were all reservists from the 377th Military Police Company, based in Cincinnati, and many of the military intelligence interrogators serving at the same time were from the Utah Army National Guard.
Good order and discipline had evaporated.
1st Sgt. Betty Jones said during a 2004 interview with investigators that a fellow military police sergeant and his men on several occasions were "drunk to the point that they could not go to duty."
Salcedo, the military intelligence soldier, said in her statement at Corsetti's court-martial that she and others drank alcohol during their time at Bagram, and at one point smoked hashish on the roof of a building.
Cammack told McClatchy that one of his sergeants drove a John Deere Gator, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, to a nearby town and traded with locals for bottles of vodka.
"Really, nobody was in charge . . . the leadership did nothing to help us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much 'figure it out on your own,' " Cammack said. "When you asked about protocol they said it's a work in progress."
PENTAGON RESPONSE
Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article. In response to a series of questions and interview requests, Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:
"The Department of Defense policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this country."
No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.
The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when prisoners were being abused at Bagram, then-Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, declined an interview request. McNeill was later made the commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, a post he held until recently.
His predecessor, then-Maj. Gen. Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck, said in an e-mail exchange that from late 2001 to 2002, his attention wasn't on detainee facilities.
"Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to your reporting . . . I was focused on battling the Taliban and al Qaida, as well as reconstruction and coordinating with the nascent Afghan government," Hagenbeck wrote. "I do not personally know of any abuses while I was there, and we focused on treating all with dignity and respect — even, and perhaps especially, those persons in our custody."
Hagenbeck is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Capt. Carolyn Wood, who led the interrogators at Bagram, was sent to Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 and assumed control of interrogation operations there that August.
A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal — known as the "Fay-Jones Report" for the two generals who authored it — found that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or participated in abuse themselves.
The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.
A key factor in serious cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the report found, was the construction of isolation areas, a move requested by Wood, who said that "based on her experience" such facilities made it easier to extract information from detainees.
Wood remains an active-duty military intelligence officer.
Matthew Schofield contributed to this report from Paris and Lyon, France.
http://www.kansascity.com/449/story/665043.html
Abuse of detainees routine at U.S. bases in Afghanistan
By TOM LASSETER
McClatchy Newspapers
American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock.
The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.
Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.
The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.
"I was punched and kicked at Bagram. . . . At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead," said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. "But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law."
Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.
When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.
According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer.
The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.
Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.
Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.
In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who'd served as detention camp guards and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights reports.
The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss McClatchy's findings.
The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul. The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses.
New detainees were shoved to the floor of a cavernous warehouse, a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that stayed dim all day, and kept in pens where they weren't allowed to speak or look at guards.
The Afghan government initially based a group of intelligence officers at Bagram, but they were pushed out. Mohammed Arif Sarwari, the head of Afghanistan's national security directorate from late 2001 to 2003, said he got a letter from U.S. commanders in mid-2002 telling him to get his men out of Bagram.
Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were creating an island with no one to watch over them.
"I said I didn't want to be involved with what they were doing at Bagram — who they were arresting or what they were doing with them," he said in an interview in Kabul.
The rate of reported abuse was higher among men who were held at the U.S. camp at Kandahar Airfield. Thirty-two out of 42 men held there whom McClatchy interviewed claimed that they were knocked to the ground or slapped about. But former detainees said the violence at Bagram was much harsher.
The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.
Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.
Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."
After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they'd chained detainees' wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell.
"Frankly, it didn't look good," Maj. Jeff Bovarnick, the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003, said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005.
"This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head," Bovarnick continued. "The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply."
The only American officer who's been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring, who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.
Beiring told investigators that he'd received no formal training in leading a military police company, "just the correspondence courses and on-the-job training."
Then-Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, the Army lawyer who investigated Beiring in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, argued that: "The government failed to present any evidence of what are 'approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.' "
On Berg's recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand.
"It's extremely hard to wage war with so many undefined rules and roles," Beiring said in a phone interview with McClatchy. "It was very crazy."
The commander of the military intelligence section that worked alongside Beiring's military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn Wood, declined to comment.
The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand, admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.
Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar.
'EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE'
U.S. soldiers' testimony in military investigations after the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar suggested that detainee abuse at Bagram occurred from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, a period of about seven months.
Soldiers who served at Bagram before that time said detainees were never beaten. Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserves officer who worked there from December 2001 to April 2002, said in an interview that none of the soldiers or American operatives he knew had resorted to abusing detainees.
An Army interrogator who was based at Bagram in the spring of 2002 and later wrote a book under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey for security reasons, said in an e-mail exchange that while soldiers pushed the limits — such as using stress positions and sleep deprivation — he never saw or heard of detainees getting beaten.
Former detainees interviewed by McClatchy and by some human rights groups, however, claimed that the violence was rampant from late 2001 until the summer of 2003 or later, at least 20 months.
Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different languages, the 28 former detainees who told McClatchy that they'd been abused there told strikingly similar stories:
Bashir Ahmad, a Pakistani who fought with the Taliban, said that in the late spring or summer of 2003, U.S. troops would chain him to the ceiling by his hands or feet. "Then they would punch me or hit me with a wood rod," he said.
Brahim Yadel, a French citizen, said he was punched and slapped during interrogations at Bagram in December 2001.
Moazzem Begg, a British citizen, said he was assaulted regularly at Bagram for most of 2002, until he was transferred to Guantanamo in January 2003.
Akhtar Mohammed, an Afghan, said that at Bagram during the spring of 2003, "when they moved me to the interrogation room they covered my eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground. And when I fell down, they punched and kicked me."
Abdul Haleem, a Pakistani, said that U.S. soldiers threw him to the ground at Bagram in 2003 and kicked him in the head, "like they were playing soccer."
Adel al Zamel, a Kuwaiti, said guards frequently waved sticks at him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002. During an interview in Kuwait City, Zamel shook his head and said he remembered hearing detainees being beaten and "the cries from the interrogation room" at Bagram.
He wasn't the only person to report sexual humiliation.
Sgt. Selena Salcedo, a U.S. military intelligence officer, said that sometime between August 2002 and February 2003 she saw another interrogator, Pfc. Damien Corsetti, pull down the pants of a detainee and leave his genitals exposed.
In a 2005 sworn statement in the court-martial of Corsetti, she said she'd left the room and that when she'd returned the detainee was bent over a table and Corsetti was waving a plastic bottle near his buttocks. She said she didn't know whether the detainee had been raped.
Corsetti was acquitted of any wrongdoing. He didn't respond to a request for comment submitted through his attorney. Salcedo pleaded guilty to kicking a detainee — Dilawar — and grabbing his ears during a December 2002 interrogation.
Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in the summer of 2002 confirmed that detainees there were struck routinely.
"Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point," said Brian Cammack, a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati. He was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.
Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail.
"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.
Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down on detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
RETRIBUTION FOR 9-11
Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001."
When detainees first had their hoods removed on arriving at Bagram, looming behind them was a large American flag and insignia of the New York Police Department, a reminder of Sept. 11.
Almost none of the detainees at Bagram, however, had anything to do with the terrorist attacks.
Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who'd passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military's term for senior terrorist operatives.
That hardly mattered.
Khaled al Asmr, a tall, gaunt Jordanian, was hauled off a U.S. military cargo plane at Bagram in early 2002. Flown in from Pakistan in heavy shackles and with a hood on his head, he was accused of being an al Qaida operative with possible connections to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Standing in an interrogation room, Asmr said, he'd already been punched in the face several times by American guards. Two Americans walked into the room, wearing civilian clothes. They pulled out pistols and held them to either side of his head as a third American man entered and walked up to Asmr, according to his account.
The third man leaned toward Asmr's face and whispered, his breath warm, "I am here to save you from these people, but you must tell me you are al Qaida."
Asmr, who told his story to a McClatchy reporter in Jordan, was declared no longer an enemy combatant after a 2004 U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo. He said he'd known some al Qaida leaders, but that was more than 15 years earlier, during the U.S.-backed Afghan uprising against the Soviets.
Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said they'd heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous insurgent the U.S. said he was.
Gul's American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez, went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court filings — which included videotaped testimony by witnesses — and in an interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.
A LAWLESS PLACE
The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.
The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.
At Bagram, however, the rules didn't apply. In February 2002, President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum standard for humane treatment.
Without those parameters, it's difficult to say what acts were or were not war crimes, said Charles Garraway, a former colonel and legal adviser for the British army and a leading international expert on military law.
Bush's order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such rules under the military's basic law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that troops on the ground didn't know what was allowed.
In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
"I think it's completely predictable, because you no longer have standards," he said.
In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.
UNTRAINED, UNDISCIPLINED
The military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47, telling them they couldn't chain prisoners to doors or to the ceiling. They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said that humiliating detainees wasn't allowed.
Neither was applicable at Bagram, however, said Bovarnick, the former senior legal officer for the installation.
The military police rulebook saying that enemy prisoners of war should be treated humanely didn't apply, he said, because the detainees weren't prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration's decision to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees.
The military police guide for the Army correctional system, which prohibits "securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in emergencies," wasn't applicable, either, because Bagram wasn't a correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.
"I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that . . . either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs," enemy prisoners of war, Bovarnick said.
Compounding the problem, military police guards and interrogators lacked proper training and received little instruction from commanders about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during military investigations and interviews by McClatchy.
The guards who worked there from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003 were all reservists from the 377th Military Police Company, based in Cincinnati, and many of the military intelligence interrogators serving at the same time were from the Utah Army National Guard.
Good order and discipline had evaporated.
1st Sgt. Betty Jones said during a 2004 interview with investigators that a fellow military police sergeant and his men on several occasions were "drunk to the point that they could not go to duty."
Salcedo, the military intelligence soldier, said in her statement at Corsetti's court-martial that she and others drank alcohol during their time at Bagram, and at one point smoked hashish on the roof of a building.
Cammack told McClatchy that one of his sergeants drove a John Deere Gator, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, to a nearby town and traded with locals for bottles of vodka.
"Really, nobody was in charge . . . the leadership did nothing to help us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much 'figure it out on your own,' " Cammack said. "When you asked about protocol they said it's a work in progress."
PENTAGON RESPONSE
Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article. In response to a series of questions and interview requests, Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:
"The Department of Defense policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this country."
No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.
The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when prisoners were being abused at Bagram, then-Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, declined an interview request. McNeill was later made the commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, a post he held until recently.
His predecessor, then-Maj. Gen. Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck, said in an e-mail exchange that from late 2001 to 2002, his attention wasn't on detainee facilities.
"Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to your reporting . . . I was focused on battling the Taliban and al Qaida, as well as reconstruction and coordinating with the nascent Afghan government," Hagenbeck wrote. "I do not personally know of any abuses while I was there, and we focused on treating all with dignity and respect — even, and perhaps especially, those persons in our custody."
Hagenbeck is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Capt. Carolyn Wood, who led the interrogators at Bagram, was sent to Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 and assumed control of interrogation operations there that August.
A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal — known as the "Fay-Jones Report" for the two generals who authored it — found that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or participated in abuse themselves.
The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.
A key factor in serious cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the report found, was the construction of isolation areas, a move requested by Wood, who said that "based on her experience" such facilities made it easier to extract information from detainees.
Wood remains an active-duty military intelligence officer.
Matthew Schofield contributed to this report from Paris and Lyon, France.
http://www.kansascity.com/449/story/665043.html
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jun 13 2008, 12:21 PM)
June 13, 2008
Editorial
Justice 5, Brutality 4
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label “unlawful enemy combatants” and throw into never-ending detention.
Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.
The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush’s attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.
The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees’ habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.
In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.
Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees’ habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.
The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees’ cases — the administration’s weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.
It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as “most fundamentally a procedural right.” Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such “generous” protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.
There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.
Editorial
Justice 5, Brutality 4
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/...agewanted=print
For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label “unlawful enemy combatants” and throw into never-ending detention.
Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.
The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush’s attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.
The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees’ habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.
In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.
Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees’ habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.
The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees’ cases — the administration’s weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.
It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as “most fundamentally a procedural right.” Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such “generous” protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.
There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.
Wll Taz, an illegal combatant taken into custody off of the field of battle does not have any of our "cherished" rights. The fact they are classified as an illegal combatant means they committed unlawful acts as described under the Geneva Convention and are being denied rights and privildges as a Prisoner of War under the Geneva Convention for not playing by the rules. In case you don't have a clue what is prohibited by combatants in the time of war here it is:
1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
( a ) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
( b ) Taking of hostages;
( c ) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
( d ) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
So if one of our Soldiers get captured by one of these SOBs and they take him out and behead him to get a little footage for one of their fine video productions or they plant a bomb in a market place to kill and maim as many innocent by-standers as possible they have NO rights what so ever under International Law as prescribed by the Geneva Convention and to regard them otherwise is a slap in the face of Justice and Civilization. The Supreme Court of the United States has committed a massive "expletive deleted" up with the ruling you just cited.
QUOTE(Marine @ Jun 20 2008, 01:07 PM)
Wll Taz, an illegal combatant taken into custody off of the field of battle does not have any of our "cherished" rights. The fact they are classified as an illegal combatant means they committed unlawful acts as described under the Geneva Convention and are being denied rights and privildges as a Prisoner of War under the Geneva Convention for not playing by the rules. In case you don't have a clue what is prohibited by combatants in the time of war here it is:
1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
( a ) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
( b ) Taking of hostages;
( c ) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
( d ) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
So if one of our Soldiers get captured by one of these SOBs and they take him out and behead him to get a little footage for one of their fine video productions or they plant a bomb in a market place to kill and maim as many innocent by-standers as possible they have NO rights what so ever under International Law as prescribed by the Geneva Convention and to regard them otherwise is a slap in the face of Justice and Civilization. The Supreme Court of the United States has committed a massive "expletive deleted" up with the ruling you just cited.
1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
( a ) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
( b ) Taking of hostages;
( c ) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
( d ) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
So if one of our Soldiers get captured by one of these SOBs and they take him out and behead him to get a little footage for one of their fine video productions or they plant a bomb in a market place to kill and maim as many innocent by-standers as possible they have NO rights what so ever under International Law as prescribed by the Geneva Convention and to regard them otherwise is a slap in the face of Justice and Civilization. The Supreme Court of the United States has committed a massive "expletive deleted" up with the ruling you just cited.
Well, technically speaking, you are right in one respect. An individual classified as an enemy combatant is entitlted to no rights according the Budh Administration. However, the Supreme Court has found that indeed they are entitled to rights under the U.S. Constitution. So you are half right.
But Marine, don't you find it a little bit interesting that all of the persons held at Guantanamo have not been captured on the battlefield. So, how can someone be classified as an enemy combatant if they have not been found on the battlefield. The Bush Administration in defining the battlefield has said its anywhere we say it is. And don't you also find it suspect that a person classified as an enemy combatant is afforded no opportunity for a hearing to at least determine under US law that he or she is indeed an enemy combatant?
I hear what you are saying regarding persons who are indeed enemy combatants. I agree with the Supreme Court -- our nation is not so weak as to have to forego our liberties just because we are at war. Russia and China and other nations may be that weak, but we are not. But my problem here is that since there is no way to challenge such a classification, that the Bush Administration could basically point a finger at anyone, anytime, anywhere and detain them.
Now, I do not believe that they have been doing this, but given the release rate of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere -- it is certainly possible that a number of the people being held are not enemy combatants at all. As a result, the US government while the Bush Administration says they have no right to the courts to challenge their detention, the US Supreme Court has determined that the Bush Administration (and its supporters like you) are wrong and misunderstand the intent of our Founding Fathers.
Now, its interetsing that you point out the most horrific allegation possible by a detainee. I would gather that there is not one detainee accused of the acts you outline.
And I point you to an earlier point I made on beheadings...they did not happen in Iraq until the US was exposed for its abuses at Abu Ghraib. This does not justify such actions, but it helps to explain the level of anger that our disrespect in the prison engendered in some of the Irai people.
Marine:
All the decision by the US Supreme Court says is that the government has a burden to show that it has a legitimate reason to hold these people.
This is a moral issue since many of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been released with no charges against them.
I know your response is that these people are terrorists who have plotted against this nation --- etc.
But guess what. That is your conjecture. If the government could prove that these people were guilty don't you think that they would try and convict them?
And if they are not guilty, don't you think it hurts us in the war on terror if we hold innocent people?
As a result, I should think that you would support the decision because it adds an element of truth to the process.
Those held at Guantanamo are held there for good reason, not just because the Executive Branch deems them to be a danger without a trial -- without the presentation of any proof -- just because it says so.
Such a system makes us look as bad as the worst dictatorships.
As Americans, we do not want that stain on us. The last thing we want is to give more reasons to the Islamists to hate the US.
So when we act, let us act justly -- governed by reason and the rule of law -- and not capriciously.
All the decision by the US Supreme Court says is that the government has a burden to show that it has a legitimate reason to hold these people.
This is a moral issue since many of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been released with no charges against them.
I know your response is that these people are terrorists who have plotted against this nation --- etc.
But guess what. That is your conjecture. If the government could prove that these people were guilty don't you think that they would try and convict them?
And if they are not guilty, don't you think it hurts us in the war on terror if we hold innocent people?
As a result, I should think that you would support the decision because it adds an element of truth to the process.
Those held at Guantanamo are held there for good reason, not just because the Executive Branch deems them to be a danger without a trial -- without the presentation of any proof -- just because it says so.
Such a system makes us look as bad as the worst dictatorships.
As Americans, we do not want that stain on us. The last thing we want is to give more reasons to the Islamists to hate the US.
So when we act, let us act justly -- governed by reason and the rule of law -- and not capriciously.
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