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Guantanamo Show Trials Re-Started
Obama is re-starting the trials of Guantanamo inmates, including the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
I have no idea whether or not Mr. Mohammed is a terrorist whose actions killed innocent Americans. If he is, I hope he is convicted and put to death. A decorated 20-year CIA veteran, who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East”, and whose astounding career formed the script for the Academy Award winning motion picture Syriana (Robert Baer) raised serious doubts in Time Magazine about Mohammed being the 9/11 mastermind. But his innocence or guilt is beyond the scope of this essay.
What I am against is convicting this guy without due process of law under the United States constitution.
Show Trials
The trials will be held in Guantanamo, which is a huge step backwards. Obama had agreed to try suspects in American courts, which would thus follow the Constitution and the rule of law.
Indeed, the town of Hardin, Montana requested that 100 Gitmo detainees be sent to its empty prison, and Congressman Jim Moran said that detainees could be tried in his Alexandria, Virginia district. So there was willingness by Americans to hold the Guantanamo inmate trials here.
Instead, we appear to be to Guantanamo "show trials".
Specifically, as of 2008, the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions disclosed that the trials have been rigged to prevent the possibility of acquittal. Specifically, the head of the Guantanamo tribunal -- who is actually in charge of both prosecuting and defending the suspects -- told the former chief prosecutor:
Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.
In addition, three other Guantanamo prosecutors -- Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf -- "asked to be relieved of duties after saying they were concerned that the process was rigged. One said he had been assured he didn’t need to worry about building a proper case; convictions were assured."
The head of the tribunal also said that -- even if the defendants are somehow acquitted -- they may not be released from Guantanamo.
And MSNBC speculated that the U.S. put a "stun belt" on alleged terrorist Moussaoui during his trial to keep him in line:
No wonder the American Bar Association, "which the Pentagon had said would help arrange such representation, has refused to participate because it objects to the trial procedures." And no wonder the defense attorneys who have agreed to represent the defendants say that the process is completely unfair. See also this interview.
Torture
Former Congresswoman and prosecutor Liz Holtzman makes a good point:
The criminal justice system identified and convicted some of those involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. By contrast, not one person has been prosecuted for the 9/11 attacks, although seven and a half years have gone by. Even Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the masterminds of 9/11, is unlikely ever to be convicted in US courts because he was repeatedly subjected to torture. Significantly, the cruel and torturous methods used on detainees never yielded enough information to capture Osama Bin Laden or his chief deputy. So much for the claims of torture's efficacy.
Before you protest that we didn't torture them, please note that the chief lawyer for Guantanamo litigation - Vijay Padmanabhan - said that torture was widespread. And Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the military commissions at Guantánamo — the novel system of trials for terror suspects that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — told Bob Woodward:
We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.
In fact, the type of torture used by the U.S. on the Guantanamo suspects is of a special type. Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions.
McClatchy fills in some of the details:
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration...
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document...
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."
Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage. See also this and this.
Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the type of torture used:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
The Accused Made Up False Statements to Stop Torture
The Miami Herald ran a story entitled "Alleged 9/11 mastermind: `I make up stories'", noting:
Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him...
''I make up stories,'' Mohammed said ...
In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
''Where is he? I don't know,'' Mohammed said. 'Then he torture me. Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don't know him.' I said no, they torture me.''
This is not new. It has already been documented that Mohammed confessed to crimes which he could not have committed, and that he said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information - telling them what he thought they wanted to hear - in an attempt to stop the torture.
Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the Red Cross:
During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.
And see this Washington Post report.
The Telegraph also noted:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and “confessed” to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl, which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable
Dick Cheney claimed that waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stopped a terror attack on L.A., but as the Chicago Tribune notes:
The Bush administration claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles -- forgetting that he wasn't captured until 2003.
(see this confirmation from the BBC: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... was captured in Pakistan in 2003").
The Other Witness Against Khalid Sheik Mohammed
But a second witness - Abu Zubaida - fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind (Zubaida was subsequently severely tortured for many months. But he initially identified KSM even before being tortured).
So we have independent confirmation that KSM was the chief architect of 9/11, right?
Well, the New Yorker notes week:
The F.B.I.’s point man on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, Daniel Coleman, had read Zubaydah’s diaries and concluded that he “had a schizophrenic personality.”
Indeed, the Washington Post noted in 2007:
Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.
"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."
***
Abu Zubaida ... was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.
***
Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind writes that Coleman advised a top FBI official at the time:
"This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Note: Some reports state that at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was killed years ago, and that the U.S. military is really holding someone else.
Update: A reader points out that a new investigation from January concludes that Mr. Mohammed did kill Pearl.
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A trial... that costs money... just borrow more money...
George and HPD: Thanks for supporting a sober discussion about the bottom line problem here:
Each accussed is put into a court which by its design will convict that person. If the government has a lot of evidence, the accussed will get a trial just like any other cititzen. If not, we have a sliding scale of "trials" and "trubunals" which the accused is assigned to, with the outcome predetermined.
This is Obama's legacy: Detention without trials.
The best writing on this is Glenn Greenwald, for instance:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/13/guantanamo
Shopping for "Guilty" verdicts? On sale now, aisle 2, GITMO market -- open 24/7/365 -- for all your (in)justice needs!
... The salient point is; what the President advertised and what he delivered. His action confirms he will retain Bush-era practices thus, institutionalizing a dangerous precedent regarding human/civil rights. As our liberties at home are under attack we must recognize this fact; atrocities waged against others, is but a small step from being waged against us...
... In the spirit of American style Banksta Kapitalism I suggest we privatize Git-mo, turning over the operation to a respected dog food manufacturer and utilizing Halliburton to broker the deal. The whole operation can be off-shored, creating Cuban jobs and avoiding U.S. taxes. It's genius, the American public gets noting and our international reputation is further diminished. - EC
http://notionalvalue.blogspot.com/2011/03/guantanamo-is-open-trials-resu...
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” -Thomas Jefferson
Well put! For those detention-loving folks upstream in this posting, Tyler allows George here because he articulates "loss of liberty" so well.
Here's Glenn Greenwald's take today:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/08/guantanamo/...
Please! Please don't video GW's trial!
Keep up the good work.Judging by the troll attacks, someone wants you to be silent!
The torturers must be brought to justice.....and I suspect the venom you are facing highlights how much the guilty fear this.
Again, thank you.
It will be on ABC, no one to watch ;-) - Ned
They're having tribunals instead of public trials to AVOID show trials.
Not quite, they're having tribunals to AVOID showing the TRUTH!
Whatever happend to that guy from Chicago that they arrested and claimed he was a terrorist? Lost in the ether......Just like some of you one day, lost and gone and nobody knows what happened to you. Can't happen you say? Guess again.
Innocent men , imprisoned without warrant and without charge for years on end. This is for you, Amerika. Watch it, because it will be coming to a theatre near you real soon. You gave up your rights, whatever was left, after the passage of the homeland security act, which was not read by any in congress. It makes me proud to be an Amerikan. How embarrassing it is, for us now to see this unfolding. Yes but it is someone else's boy in there and besides they are from some place we don't understand, and we don't care. But if they do this to the least of humans, they will most assuredly do it to any of us, at anytime.
So what facts do you have to back up your claims that they are innocent? Do you really think all those thousands of US ground troops just decided to round up a few hundred random goat herders and ship them to Gitmo for fun?
Do you realize that if they were captured on a battlefield, the US soldier does not need a warrant? Do you think the US troops in Europe had an arrest warrant for every German POW they captured during WWII? Did they have to go to a federal judge in Washington DC and ask for a warrant to capture Corporal Helmut Schultz from the German 2nd Panzer Division in October 1944?
Fact don't really matter when you're frothing at the mouth while spewing out Amerikkka is the Great Satan
Guess that means that we can rely on YOU to quietly surrender to any foreign invading army, because ya know, "they're just here to help us!"
Check your premises, because the logical conclusions from them are completely fscked!
America remains a great country despite the ever increasing amount of morons like you - pull your head out of your ass. people like you are destroying all that is good about america - you are mindless sheep who are easily mislead by a degenerate group of globalist Internationalist billionaires who have hijacked this country. I know you are comfortable and safe with your head firmly up your ass, but please pull it out and expose yourself to the bright beautiful sunlight -the truth. Please -and ask your friends to do the same -as we are running out of time.
So let me ask you. Did Afghanistan or Iraq have anything to do with 911? If not, then what in the hell are we doing , fighting and dying over in these places for nothing and at the same time imprisoning people whose only crime is to fight us and want us to get the hell out of their countries and leave them the hell alone?
So what facts do you have to back up your claims that they are innocent?
Look what you are saying. Of course their guilty until proven innocent. You sound like the Great Satan.
... round up a few hundred random goat herders and ship them to Gitmo
Yes. In some cases, undoubtably true. That's why a long long time ago, we started having jury trials.
Read the source material. Iraqi's were paid by the U.S.to turn in people. They made cash, and settled old feuds, by turning in farmers and other innocent people who wouldn't know the difference between a wheelbarrow and an ied.
Sorta like your big sis' "see something, say something" programming?? You think $ for tips won't come to the USSA here under her watch? You'll think it's ok then since you'll feel safer. That's what matters GW, all about how you feel?
Thanks George. There have been cases of feuding clans/families. One calls in the USA heavies against the other.
I just wish BHO kept all of his campaign "promises" -- it would have resulted in him being the first President to be recalled (understanding that's not possible).
What a moron - he does not know what he is saying or doing. And Americans LOVE him.
But he does have his Nobel Peace Prize to fall back on.....
I wish BHO had kept any of his campaign promises.
That said, if you hit a many with a rubber hose enough times as you waterboard him he'll tell you whatever Dick Cheny needs him to say.
That's the point, isn't it?
he'll tell you whatever Dick Cheny needs him to say.
Gitmo, secret prisons, torture, America's goulag.
Yeh they try and play it off like it is .......well its those enemy people so don't worry about it. Well I am sorry but I don't like it and I want it stopped immediately.
When Obama decided to give Ghaliani full legal treatment and privileges befitting a U.S. citizen he was exonerated (last November) of 284 charges (convicted only for the attempt to destroy government property-just not the people inside).
That's why that isn't going to happen again.
You know why that happened? Because the son of a bitch probably didn't do anything and all of the stupid charges were trumped up charges that could not be proven etc.......Its a joke......the whole damn thing is a big joke. How can these people who live and work in such a environment go home and night and sleep and pretend that somehow they are doing some kind of a job that is worthwhile? It is sick beyond belief......
This could all have been avoided years ago if we had just followed the Geneva Convention: irregulars, out-of-uniform = summary execution.
Bingo. There is no requirement or precedent for extending to illegal combatants all the bells and whistles of the U.S. criminal justice system as if they were U.S. citizens and civilians.
None of these goons were read their Miranda rights I bet - I suppose we should just throw open the jail house doors now right? I mean, where else does this absurd conceit lead GW?
Again, the whole idea of enemy combatants is based upon a lie because these stupid illegal and immoral wars are all based upon lies. So in reality I don't care about their rights per se, because number 1, these men should not even be there and we should not be fighting these wars that never end. We should cease and desist from all fighting, sue for peace and pay for reconstruction and try and help those who we have harmed and stand down and tell the soldiers to go home and try and live what lives they can , after all of this, but that will be a big order since most of them are so messed up it is not even funny, with the multiple tours in combat.........it does something to a man, that can never be undone......now these men are walking time bombs who when they are no longer any use are turned out and many of them live on the streets and under bridges, just like they did after vietnam.........i am sick of it all and i want peace and i want my country back and i am ready to fight and die for that opportunity like the Libyans or the Egyptians are anyone else who loves their country.....
(see this and this). Indeed, Wilkerson signed a declaration under penalty of perjury stating that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld covered up the fact that hundreds of innocent men were sent to Guantanamo because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror.
Children were allegedly tortured (and see this)
c'mon GW, u know that Wilkerson is the source of the nasty outing of Valerie Plame Wilson vs. Scooter Libby. That would be accessory to felony and ...
He's a Powell rumpswab, u should do an expose' on him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQFEY9RIRJA
- Ned
I love this line of reasoning that liberals use: find one dissenter in the GW Bush administration -- in this case the #2 man in the State Department -- and take everything he says as Gospel simply because it confirms what you want to believe and ignore everything else. Let me ask you this: why is the #2 man in the State Department qualified to opine on the guilt or innocence of anyone held at Guantanomo let alone speak to what anyone else "knows?" Uhh... Duh... gee, don't let that get in the way of your story.
Your inability to see that the due process requirements of the US court system (mirandizing, evidence gathering, etc. etc.) are fundamentally inconsistent with the realities of a live battlefield which makes the US court system entirely inappropriate for captured combatants illuminates just how thinking impaired liberals are. "Captain, as soon as you are done on patrol we need you to hop a flight to Virginia to give a deposition for a trial about someone you detained on the battlefield after shooting at you 3 years ago." Really, this is the way we're supposed to fight a war?
If any of these rat bastards in Guantanamo were innocent then you should be applauding their ability to finally get a trial. But you don't care about them, its just the typical whiney anti-American liberal rant from another pseudo-intellectual who never bothers to think through anything before spouting off like the world needs another enlightened opinion from the unenlightened among us.
Real conservatives are against torture and unnecessary war. Only Neoconservatives (and neoLiberals) support both.
Children were allegedly tortured? So in your demented eyes, all alegations against those evil Americans are true, but all allegations against captured enemies are false.
The evil US ground troops in Afghanistan, a country of 25 million people, just decided to round up a few hundred random innocent goat tenders and send them to Gitmo for the heck of it.
Try linking to some legitimate news organizations next time. Your blogs and blogs of your friends don't count. Claims from a disgruntled former state department employee don't count for much unless he has facts to back up the allegations. Wilkers has been a big Bush critic and anti-war activist since 2003. He supported several democrat politicians. There wouldn't be any bias in his allegations, would there?
You take oral testimony as fact when it backs your views, but dismiss any evidence when it does not back your views. Very childish.
Respected political scientist Michael Haas has confirmed that children were tortured, and Raw Story has explained that the newly-release Bush torture memos may corroborate claims that at least some detainees' children were tortured using insects.
Innocent and not having enough evidence to hold them after a military trial are two different things George.
One in seven are either captured again or killed after being released.
But they are getting a trial...just not the civilian circus trial the moonbats would have loved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21gitmo.html?_r=1
And the commander of Abu Ghraib bases his opinion on what exactly? Were trials conducted? If so, after the trials were over and they were found innocent are you saying they were still kept in prison?...I don't think so.
You forgot to mention the abuse of some prisoners (yes abuse) at Abu Ghraib was discovered and reported and prosecuted by the military!
Ah the fool is back. Where's your blog?
A few peons were prosecuted for Abu Grahib. Most of it was surpressed. There are many more graphic photos that have never been released.
So, Numb-nuts, do you believe the military came clean about Abu Grahib?
GW - America is supposed to be better than all of this. It is shameful.
True patriots should be ashamed of their government and work to route the bastards out and put them in a court of law to account for their crimes committed in OUR name.
Keep up the good work sir.
raised serious doubts in Time Magazine about Mohammed being the 9/11 mastermind.
well what did he say about dick cheney...a far more likely mastermind of the days events
You fucking moron. Torture wasn't used to extract confessions for trials. Torture (i.e. waterboarding and sleep deprivation) was used to extract information about other active terrorist plots. These interrogations produced actionable intelligence that saved lives. But of course you can't use information extracted in this manner in a US court room so there needs to be some alternative solution: military tribuanls. A solution advocated by both Pres. Bush and now Obama, the US Congress and the US Supreme Court. Why don't you make an attempt to learn the facts before you piss your panties and start hyperventilating you self-righteous turd.
what terrorist plots are you talking about? Name one. The only terrorist in this world are the British, the Amerikan and the Israeli governments.........
Torture was used to build the phony case for war.
People were tortured until they would say "Yes Saddam has yellow-cake." "Yes Saddam loves Ossama."
It's the worst kind of Fascist, Police-State BullShit.
Hollywood used to make movies where we gunned-down the Nazi bad guys for this type of evil.
Abu Nidal is not available for comment.
Abu Nidal was not tortured to to build the false case for war with Iraq.
Do you have a point?
Point? ya-he was taken out and shot.
Appearently by Saddam.
Again what is your point. You and your fellow torture fans seem to be advocating we behave like Saddam.
is that your point?
The point...you insufferable troll-bot...is he was a known international terrorist, given sanctuary and lodging by the government of Saddam.
But of course...the leftwing moonbats screech that there were no terrorists in Iraq, so it can't be so...even though the head of the nation itself was one of the biggest terrorists in the region paying Palestinian families $25,000 "a pop" when one of the family members blew themselves up inside a city bus or restaurant killing civilians anywhere in the world.
So Saddam had a calculated price for human life, however small...the only question remaining is did he value the victims at $1,000 dollars a head and the Palestinian's at zero or the Palestinian's at $25,000 and the victims at zero.
Idiot.
It was clearly stated above that torture was used to extract (manufacture) information showing a link between Al-CIA-DUH and Iraq.
Your assertions and inferences simply do not matter. Just more regurgitated drivel about how we have to do what we have to do to get the bad brown men sitting on top of our oil.
As an aside, seeing that you do not mind if torture is used, as long as it is for "the bad guys", what would you think should your name come up in one of these interrogations?
pods