Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 11/18/09 - Legal proceedings, such as they are, rumbled to life again today at Guantanamo Bay. Pre-trial issues in the case of Mohammed Kamin, an Afghan man who was captured by the U.S. in Afghanistan in 2003, were heard in a military commission courtroom on a small hill a few miles away from where the more than 200 detainees left at Guantanamo are housed.
More than seven years after U.S. forces picked up a 15-year-old boy in a remote Afghan town and accused him of throwing a grenade at a U.S. soldier, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of deciding where to give him his day in court.
I'm a big fan of out-of-the-box, attention-grabbing ads. These ones are running in the Farragut North metro stop here in DC (one of the busiest downtown stops and frequented a lot by DC organizational/lobbyist types) and I thought I would share.
"Close Guantanamo. End Torture. Investigate All Abuses."
"...it (torture) serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us."-Sen. John McCain talking about torture, FOX News, March 20, 2009
Osama bin Laden wearing an "I <3 Guantanamo" t-shirt
These are a sampling I took while waiting for a train. They're being run by Avaaz.org, which is doing a campaign to pressure Obama on the issue. More about it here.
It's not every day that retired generals denounce a Vice President. But two distinguished military leaders felt compelled to speak out against Mr. Cheney's support of torture, in an op-ed in today's Miami Herald.
Back in May, the Pentagon told the press that 1 in 7 Guantanamo detainees "returned to terrorism or militant activity." The New York Times ran with this lead, without even requesting a definition of "returned to terrorism or militant activity." Weeks later, the New York Times had to run a correction, essentially blaming the whole confusion on not receiving documents from the Pentagon. This was, of course, a ridiculous excuse. The Pentagon responded to my request for documentation in a matter of hours, with a pdf that described, entirely, how they define whether or not someone is suspected of returning to the battle field:
As I was looking over Jeralyn's top post on TalkLeft today, this paragraph caught my eye...
Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards, in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others said they had their fingernails ripped off, or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.
...and I immediately thought...
"More abuse at Guantanamo."
"Or Abu Ghraib."
"Or Bagram."
But I had overlooked the title of Jeralyn's article, "Iran's Abuse of Post-Election Detainees," and for the first and probably the only time in my life, I looked at a story about prison abuse with a mix of emotions which included relief.
"At least this time it wasn't my government."
I invite anyone else to try this out as a thought experiment, and imagine that you read Jeralyn's paragraph without knowing where it came from.
Wouldn't you probably assume that the abusers were... us.
Earlier this month I sat in the observer box in an air-conditioned court room in Guantánamo Bay, wondering what it would be like if commission proceedings designed to try suspected terrorists lived up to the old U.S. Army recruiting slogan, "Be all you can be."
David Danzig is at Guantanamo Bay this week observing military commissions.
Guantánamo Bay, July 15, 2009 --- Imagine for a moment that you are Richard Federico, the Navy Lieutenant charged with defending Mohammed Kamin, a man that the U.S. government has reportedly held at Guantánamo Bay since 2004 under charges that he provided "material support" to terrorists.
Guantánamo Bay, July 15, 2009: As the Obama administration and Congress mull reinventing for the third time a legal system to try terrorism suspects, three hearings were held today at Guantánamo Bay in the military commission cases of Omar Khadr, Mohammed Kamin, and Ibrahim al Qosi.
Guantánamo Bay, July 15, 2009: As the Obama administration and Congress mull reinventing for the third time a legal system to try terrorism suspects, three hearings were held today at Guantánamo Bay in the military commission cases of Omar Khadr, Mohammed Kamin, and Ibrahim al Qosi.
Guantánamo Bay, July 14, 2009: Navy Captain John Murphy, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, announced today that military prosecutors were ready to proceed with cases against 66 of the more than 220 security detainees held at the naval facility in Guantánamo Bay.
On January 20, 2002, six Algerian men who had been arrested in Bosnia arrived at the American prison on Guantanamo Bay. One of them, Lakhdar Boumediene, won a landmark case in the Supreme Court, and was subsequently released to France on May 15, 2009. Others, including Saber Lahmar, are still "detained."
Melissa Hoffer, one of the lawyers who represents the Algerian prisoners, has described the conditions of their imprisonment and the circumstances of their transfer from Bosnia to Guantanamo.
After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the United States.
"We could not understand what he was saying."
When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting -- brief, truncated cries.
The stark contrast between real life at Guantanamo Bay, and the fantasy that has been built up around the so-called "hardened terrorists" who are housed there was brought into high relief this week.
On Monday, officials told the Associated Press that a 31-year-old Yemeni detainee - Muhammmad Ahmad Abdallah Salih - had killed himself in his cell. Salih, who admitted that he had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, had spent 7.5 years behind bars at Guantanamo.
Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantanamo shouldn't be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states.
In the survey, Americans were inclined to accept the argument by Cheney and former president George W. Bush that the detention center had made the U.S. safer. By 40 percent-18 percent, they said the prison had strengthened national security rather than weakened it.
"According to Deadline Scotland, Glasgow video game company T-Enterprise has hired Moazzam Begg, a former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, as a consultant on upcoming video game Rendition: Guantanamo, a title set in the infamous U.S. prison camp."
More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney's recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney's torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, "At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander's assessment of Cheney's torture policy. According to Bagwell, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
Now that apologists for Obama are trying to justify his plans for indefinite "preventive detention" with a perverted application of the Geneva Conventions' allowance for detaining prisoners of war for the duration of a war, and some especially devoted Obamabots are even claiming that international treaties like the Geneva Conventions supersede the Constitution, and can accordingly over-rule the due process provisions of the Bill of Rights, it's probably worth recalling that the Supreme Court has already definitively ruled against this ludicrous interpretation of Article VI of the Constitution in Reid v.Covert.
The United States is entirely [354 U.S. 1, 6] a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution.
(Quoting Article VI, Clause 2...) "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land . . . "
There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution.
Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result.
"The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution."
I can't imagine how this language could be any clearer.
It's also probably worth mentioning that no Declaration of War has been voted by the Congress, and therefore the United States is not at war, as defined by the Constitution.
The detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere are not "prisoners of war." They are simply the victims of a rogue executive branch of the United States government, which has illegally abrogated and continues to abrogate the due process provisions of the United States Constitution.
As I sit here on May 25, 2009 and reflect on the meaning of this day, just as I do quietly and privately on every Memorial Day, I remember the service and sacrifice of those who went before me, including my own family's not insignificant contributions in both World Wars and in Korea. Compared to them, my own twenty years of service as a reservist seems insignificant if not trivial. Nonetheless on a day like today, I can't but help being galled by the recent "road show" undertaken by the former Vice President Dick Cheney with its theatrical, if not alarmist claim, that the current administration has undermined the security of the United States. Mr. Cheney has suggested that Barack Obama would set the country on a course where other Americans will once again find themselves in harms way. I find this political grandstanding nothing less than preposterous, when one stops to consider that it is coming from a man, who when it was his time to serve his country in Vietnam, opted out as he had, in his own words, "other priorities". In his pursuit of "other priorities", Dick Cheney would benefit from multiple deferments from military service while other Americans were fighting and dying in Southeast Asia. Cheney's assertion that Obama has embarked on a "reckless" course of action in seeking to close Guantanamo should be seen as a rather curious statement when one considers that it was Cheney and his Neocon fellow travelers who advocated for a war with Iraq, on the most dubious grounds, thereby engineering the most reckless undertaking in American history.
I can give the Bush Administration a pass for operating beyond the pale of accepted rules of engagement in the period immediately after the September 11 attacks owing to the gravity of the situation and the unknowable state of national security which resulted from those attacks. I can also understand how American intelligence officers at that time, in an effort to forestall another attack, could chose to employ interrogation techniques that can only be categorized as torture. That said, as time passed and the threat environment was revealed to be far less dangerous than had been anticipated the justification for torture and detainment without due process became harder to justify. It is impossible to deny that the existence of the Guantanamo facility along with the abuses at Abu Ghraib would become key factors in the recruitment of new adherents to the radical Muslim jihad and thereby create new and more multifaceted threats to be addressed.
In an address to American troops in Europe during World War II, General George S. Patton would state:" You don't win wars by dying for your country, you win wars by getting the other guy to die for his." The corollary line of logic to Patton's advice for our time is that you don't win wars by creating new enemies. At this point in time it is a forgone conclusion that the existence of Guantanamo works against our national security interests, as it is the single best recruitment tool presently available to Al Qaeda, thereby contributing to the pool of available enemy combatants. For those who have taken the time to listen to the debate, there is bi-partisan agreement on this fact as evidenced by the recent comments of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) along with the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, all of whom have agreed that Guantanamo needs to be closed. The crux of the argument revolves around how to relocate the detainees so as not to compromise our security.
With general agreement on the need to deal with the Guantanamo detainees in some other fashion, what then is the motive behind the Cheney "road show" other than the former Vice Presidents seeming need to redeem himself in the eyes of the American public? As has been speculated by the talking classes, Cheney is still smarting from the fact that he and his Neocon clique were marginalized and took a back seat to Condoleezza Rice and the State Department after the 2004 election. Why is it that Cheney just can't accept that his version of national security may be inapplicable at this point in time or that it is perhaps, less than well founded given the current threat environment? After all, for all of the claims that Bush and Cheney prevented another attack on U.S. soil, the fact of the matter is that this country suffered it's worst terrorist attack on their watch. In reality Dick Cheney, with his advocating for War in Iraq and his championing of "enhanced interrogation" and unlimited detention may have done more to endanger the security of the country than Obama ever could by closing down Guantanamo. What will Mr. Cheney have to say if individuals who carry out the next terror attack on the United States admit to interrogators that their motive for joining the jihad was the invasion of Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or the existence of Guantanamo?
Thanks to all who offered thoughts and wisdom in advance of my segment on MSNBC today. Truly appreciated.
At the last minute, they switched the centerpiece of our discussion away from Ari Melber's Politico piece on Obama's reality-show presidency to a discussion of Guantanamo and the new sexist RNC ad attacking Pelosi on torture.
To folks like Joel who recommended "pivoting" to a substantive discussion -- and pursuing opportunities to critique how the media often "bury the more important issues," I hope I did ya proud.
David E. Graham is the Executive Director of The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, US Army. He served in the US Army as a Judge Advocate for thirty-one years, specializing in International and Operational Law.
Rather than concentrating his attention on remedies available to "enemy combatants," Graham challenges the denial of habeas corpus implicit in the government's "unilateral determination that each of these detainees is an 'unlawful enemy combatant.'"
The definition of "enemy combatants" is unconstitutional, and likewise every procedure arising from it.
When I taught Ethics and The Constitution, I never ran across anything resembling a "Feasibility" Clause..!
It's really sad that clearly President Obama still does not get it...
The Constitution is not a Chinese menu from which you can and choose one from Column A and one from Column B...a document of convenience..one you can make it up as you go merrily along..!
Once you leave the comfort and shelter of the Constitution you are on the road to ruin, as both Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi are learning the hard way, and suffering the ramifications thereof..and President Obama shall apparently learn the hard way as well..sadly...for us all..and his legacy..
