PeZook wrote:
I always found it very amusing how the Greatest Country In The World (TM) is so scared of being attacked and destroyed by terrorists that it ends up killing more people than all the terrorists in the XXth century combined.
No western country was ever destroyed or even significantly destabilized by terrorism. Ever. And we've had a lot of it in the XXth century.
Oh, and let us not forget the 19th century. Where there was an actual stateless terrorist ideology with significant percentages of support among every western population, which actually managed to kill several head of states and inspire violent uprisings. (If anybody does not know it, I am talking about anarchists and violent socialists). Anarchism was a far more serious threat than all Islamist terrorist before and now taken together.
I suggest that when the islamists have murdered three US presidents and committed at least thirty assassination attempts (that actually were committed) then Islamic terrorism is on the same level.
TheHammer wrote:I've answered this as much as I'm willing to. I don't have anything new to say at this point. I'll refrain back to what I said earlier in that if I were placing a bet, I'd bet on most of them being dirt bags. Yeah its a gut feeling since we haven't seen the evidence presented at trial yet.
My gut tells me it is spelled with two ts. Who is merriam webster to disagree with my gut?
But deep down I think most people would make that same bet.
Most people also elected Hitler.
I will point out that your final assertion is no more valid than mine. In the end, we'll have to wait and see how these tribunals shake out.
On the contrary. There are dozens of cases where people have been imprisoned for no reason. There are also dozen of cases the US handed over to other countries because they were innocent. All in all, the evidence does not support your belief that your ignorance is just as valid as the others.
Andrew J. wrote:Thanas wrote:Given the descriptions of the military courts so far by lawyers, it is not a day in court at all.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Bush-era commissions? I've heard the procedures for the new ones are significantly more protective than they were, although not quite the same as they are in civilian trials.
Brief description of a new improved military court:
The United States now has more than 1,500 Afghans and other countries’ nationals imprisoned at the Bagram Air Field, where I visited last week, at the invitation of the U.S. military. The administration has significantly improved conditions. They have built a new prison to house the growing number of detainees — which has almost tripled since 2009.
The administration has also improved transparency — allowing journalists and human rights organizations to visit. Its means of determining whom to detain, however, has not kept pace with the physical improvements.
To be sure, detainees now get a hearing approximately every six months. This alone represents important progress. Under the Bush administration, detainees had no opportunity to make their case. They languished in a cramped, windowless Soviet-era prison for years — not even knowing the charges against them. Many were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including systematic sleep deprivation and stress positions. That practice appears to have been eliminated as well.
But these current hearings, known as Detainee Review Boards, still don’t offer the minimum required elements of due process. This is not only a violation of international law; it’s a major obstacle to the U.S. military’s critical campaign to win “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people.
Take the case of Gulalet, whose hearing I saw at Bagram earlier this month. The U.S. military holds up to a dozen such hearings a day. I was permitted to sit in on four.
The prisoner, wearing a white shalwar kamiz and wrapped in a gray blanket, sat facing a board of three military officers in a Bagram hearing room. His hands and feet were shackled. He’d been imprisoned since last spring and informed of the charges against him in June.
A military lawyer summarized the case, saying Gulalet owned a compound, which was raided by Afghan and NATO forces. The troops discovered explosives and bomb-making materials in the house next to his. Gulalet’s clothes did not test positive for explosive residue, but he was assessed to be a facilitator for improvised explosive devices.
When Gulalet spoke, however, this story unraveled. “Yes, that’s my house, where I was detained,” he said, through a Pashto interpreter. He explained that he lives there with his father, mother, uncles and his wife. “The other house I don’t know,” Gulalet said, “It doesn’t belong to me.”
The judge asked for clarification: “So do you own the house or the compound?”
Gulalet said he owns only the house, not the compound — and not the other house where the explosives were found. That house is owned by “an old man who lives in Kandahar city.” Gulalet said he barely knows him.
The officer who read the charges then asked him a series of questions.
“What do you think of the Taliban? Do you like the Taliban, or do you hate the Taliban? Do you have friends who have engaged in anti-coalition activity?”
“I am busy with my family,” Gulalet replied. “I swear I don’t understand this business of Taliban. I am a farmer; this is the first time I am detained.”
Gulalet was then asked questions about his neighbors — which he said he couldn’t answer because he doesn’t really know them. Then an officer assigned to act as his “personal representative” stood up.
“How have you been treated here?” the soldier asked.
“I’ve been treated very well,” Gulalet answered.
His personal representative had no further questions.
This is what passes for justice at the U.S. prison at Bagram. Though the detainee can make a statement, he is not represented by a lawyer and usually cannot see much of the evidence against him — because it’s classified. Though the review board can recommend his release, the commander of the detention facility can ignore that recommendation.
Many defense lawyers and former detainees I interviewed in Afghanistan said that, frequently, the classified “evidence” against a detainee consists of a false accusation made by an enemy of the detainee or his family — often based on a tribal feud or land dispute.
By not knowing the exact charges, or who made them, and unable to cross-examine the incriminating witness, the detainee cannot fully defend himself.
Meanwhile, the prisoner has no lawyer, only a “personal representative” — a uniformed U.S. soldier, who the detainee has little reason to trust. In the cases I observed, the personal representative asked a few questions at most, usually with no evident aim. One said nothing.
Under international law, a detainee in the Afghan armed conflict has the right to challenge the grounds for his detention to an impartial body with authority to enter final decisions on continued detention or release. The Detainee Review Board process does not meet that standard.
“I am busy with my family,” Gulalet replied. “I swear I don’t understand this business of Taliban. I am a farmer; this is the first time I am detained.”
Gulalet was then asked questions about his neighbors — which he said he couldn’t answer because he doesn’t really know them. Then an officer assigned to act as his “personal representative” stood up.
“How have you been treated here?” the soldier asked.
“I’ve been treated very well,” Gulalet answered.
His personal representative had no further questions.
This is what passes for justice at the U.S. prison at Bagram. Though the detainee can make a statement, he is not represented by a lawyer and usually cannot see much of the evidence against him — because it’s classified. Though the review board can recommend his release, the commander of the detention facility can ignore that recommendation.
Many defense lawyers and former detainees I interviewed in Afghanistan said that, frequently, the classified “evidence” against a detainee consists of a false accusation made by an enemy of the detainee or his family — often based on a tribal feud or land dispute.
By not knowing the exact charges, or who made them, and unable to cross-examine the incriminating witness, the detainee cannot fully defend himself.
Meanwhile, the prisoner has no lawyer, only a “personal representative” — a uniformed U.S. soldier, who the detainee has little reason to trust. In the cases I observed, the personal representative asked a few questions at most, usually with no evident aim. One said nothing.
Under international law, a detainee in the Afghan armed conflict has the right to challenge the grounds for his detention to an impartial body with authority to enter final decisions on continued detention or release. The Detainee Review Board process does not meet that standard.[/quote]
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49884.html
Great defence there. "Have you been treated well?" Any civilian defence attorney would deal with this differently. The prosecution has no case, but instead of pointing out inconsistencies you get numbnuts like this "personal representative" doing stuff like that.
Okay, instead of reading off a list of exceptions to that general principle, I'm just going to say the we should have held these guys as POWs from the very beginning; they'd have been guaranteed better standards of treatment and the executive wouldn't have had to try to create some new regime of preventive detention capable of passing constitutional and international law standards.
They'd also have been released by now if they were POWs. And they wouldn't have been able to have been tortured, which of course is what the USA wanted to do right from the start.
Glenn Greenwald on this:
link.
None of this is the slightest bit unexpected. The new Executive Order has been previewed for months and merely codifies what has long been Obama's policy: "long" in the sense of "since he's inaugurated" -- not, of course, "when he was a Senator and presidential candidate." I'm writing about this merely to address the excuse from the White House and its loyalists that the fault for this policy, this inability to "close Guantanamo," lies with Congress, which forced the President to abandon his oft-stated campaign pledge. That excuse is pure fiction.
It is true that Congress -- with the overwhelming support of both parties -- has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for "closing Guantanamo" in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure.
The preservation of the crux of the Bush detention scheme was advocated by Obama long before Congress' ban on transferring detainees to the U.S. It was in May, 2009 -- a mere five months after his inauguration -- that Obama stood up in front of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives and demanded a new law of "preventive detention" to empower him to imprison people without charges: a plan the New York Times said "would be a departure from the way this country sees itself." It was the same month that the administration announced it intended to continue to deny many detainees trials, instead preserving the military commissions scheme, albeit with modifications. And the first -- and only -- Obama plan for "closing Guantanamo" came in December, 2009, and it entailed nothing more than transferring the camp to a supermax prison in Thompson, Illinois, while preserving its key ingredients, prompting the name "Gitmo North."
None of this was even arguably necessitated by Congressional action. To the contrary, almost all of it took place before Congress did anything. It was Barack Obama's position -- not that of Congress -- that detainees could and should be denied trials, that our court system was inadequate and inappropriate to try them, and that he possessed the unilateral, unrestrained power under the "laws of war" to order them imprisoned for years, even indefinitely, without bothering to charge them with a crime and without any review by the judiciary, in some cases without even the right of habeas review (to see why claims of such "law of war" detention power are so baseless, see the points here, especially point 5).
In other words, Obama -- for reasons having nothing to do with Congress -- worked from the start to preserve the crux of the Bush/Cheney detention regime. Even with these new added levels of detention review (all inside the Executive Branch), this new Executive Order is little more than a by-product of that core commitment, and those blaming it on Congress either have little idea what they're talking about or are simply fabricating excuses in order to justify yet another instance where Obama dutifully "bolsters" the Bush War on Terror template. Indefinite detention and military commissions are continuing because Obama worked from the start for that goal -- not because Congress forced him to do so.
As as happened over and over, while progressives and civil libertarians are furious about the new Order, former Bush officials and right-wing Warriors are ecstatic. The anti-Muslim McCarthyite Rep. Peter King (R-NY) issued a statement this morning, as quoted by The Post, which lavished Obama with praise: "I commend the Obama Administration for issuing this Executive Order. The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities." That perfectly captures the legacy of Barack Obama on civil liberties.
It's certainly possible to claim that none of this much matters because other issues are more important. It's coherent to argue that -- everyone has to prioritize what matters most -- but that wasn't an argument I ever heard prior to January 20, 2009, when Democrats generally and Obama specifically aggressively touted these issues for substantial political gain.
As always, the most harmful aspect of the Obama legacy is that he has converted what were once controversial right-wing Bush policies into unchallenged bipartisan consensus, to endure indefinitely and without any opposition from either party. And, to underscore the point once more: Obama's plan as President (as opposed to as a candidate) was never to dismantle the Bush/Cheney system at Guantanamo; before Congress acted at all, his only objective was to preserve its core, defining features and then move that system to Illinois.
They ARE innocent in regard to the crimes they are accused of (at least some of them most likely, obviously not everyone).
