I'm not auditioning for president of the Glenn Greenwald fan club

but...

he made an excellent point this morning when commenting on michael mukasey's wapo op-ed in today's edition...

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, The Washington Post, today, arguing against civilian trials for Guantanamo detainees:

The civilized world has tried over several hundred years to establish rules of warfare so that those who wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly and do not target civilians are treated as prisoners of war when captured. Those who follow none of these rules are treated as war criminals, not as ordinary defendants accused of ordinary crimes and entitled to far more robust protection than war criminals.

[...]

The irony here is that the decision to declare enemy fighters in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants" -- which is what, in turn, "justified" denial of Geneva Conventions protections for them (at least until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise) -- was grounded in the fact that they do not, as Mukasey put it, "wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly." That's what made them, in the U.S. lexicon, not only "unlawful combatants" but even Terrorists. But, of course, exactly the same is true for our countless private contractors who are acting as combatants for the U.S. in multiple parts of the world... .

as i said yesterday, the ability of the u.s. to wax righteous to the rest of the world while blindly justifying its own utter disregard for accountability, the rule of law and internationally accepted standards of conduct is seemingly limitless...

speaking of which, a neighbor of mine in the rv park is on temporary duty here with the air national guard, serving as a mission commander for drone missions in afghanistan and pakistan and probably other places i'll never hear about... as with so many of these guys, he's a decent enough sort, pleasant to talk with, laid back and easy-going... i'm sure he doesn't think of himself as either a war criminal or a terrorist and i'm sure nothing i could say would change that... however, i'd be really curious to know how much and how deeply he actually thinks about what he's doing... i can't believe he doesn't think about it at all but i strongly suspect he tells himself that, unpleasant as it is, it's a job that's got to be done... if pressed, i'd guess most people would respond that way, so thoroughly have we been sold on the unimpeachable rightness of united states behavior in all things...

p.s. how come it is that former officials of a thoroughly discredited presidential administration - rove, cheney, yoo, mcconnell, mukasey, et al, ad nauseam - keep getting trotted back out to spew their fear-based, constitution-shredding garbage...? why do their opinions still matter...? why not john dean...? why not paul craig roberts...? for that matter, why not ramsey clark...? just askin'...

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An attorney who cried over Nixon's resignation offers an insider's view of detainee hearings at Guantánamo

another card is pulled from the bushco house of cards...

a profile of the man who was perhaps the most instrumental in getting the supreme court to agree to hear the detainees' case...

In June, Colonel [Stephen E.] Abraham became the first military insider to criticize publicly the Guantánamo hearings, which determine whether detainees should be held indefinitely as enemy combatants.

[...]

Colonel Abraham arrived at the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants during a chaotic period in September 2004.

[...]

It was obvious, Colonel Abraham said, that officials were under intense pressure to show quick results. Quickly, he said, he grew concerned about the quality of the reports being used as evidence. The unclassified evidence, he said, lacked the kind of solid corroboration he had relied on throughout his intelligence career. “The classified information,” he added, “was stripped down, watered down, removed of context, incomplete and missing essential information.”

[...]

In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp.

The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

[...]

“Anything that resulted in a ‘not enemy combatant’ would just send ripples through the entire process,” [Abraham] said. “The interpretation is, ‘You got the wrong result. Do it again.’ ”

[...]

As it turned out, lawyers at his sister’s firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, began representing detainees in 2006. Though she is not involved, she mentioned that her brother had worked on the hearings.

Last month, one of the lawyers, Matthew J. MacLean, a former Army lawyer, called Colonel Abraham and asked him to look at an affidavit filed in May by Admiral McGarrah.

Colonel Abraham said the admiral’s affidavit, describing the hearing process as orderly and considered, had convinced him that he had to step forward. He began to describe his experience.

“This was it,” Mr. MacLean said last week, “the first evidence of how these tribunals operated from the inside.”

Mr. MacLean called Colonel Abraham for the first time on June 8. The detainees’ lawyers filed his seven-page affidavit in court on June 22. It was sharply critical of the hearings and the evidence they used, saying “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.” On June 29, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the detainees’ case.

needless to say, the operation to discredit abraham, a lifelong conservative and highly decorated counterespionage and counterterrorism army reserve intelligence officer, hardly one to be accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, is now in full swing...

• He has been called a whistleblower and a traitor.

• Pentagon officials say his account indicates that he misunderstood the purpose of the hearings, known as combatant status review tribunals or C.S.R.T.’s, which the officials say “afford greater protections for wartime detainees than any nation has ever provided.”

• [A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Navy said], “Lieutenant Colonel Abraham was not in a position to have a complete view of all the evidence used in the C.S.R.T.’s, as well as the process as a whole.”

• Pentagon officials have said such criticism is not meaningful because a combatant status hearing “is not a criminal trial.”

every person who summons the courage to speak out serves as an inspiration for others who may be reticent to come forward... it is these people who are the true heroes of our republic, because they must may be the ones who will ultimately save it...

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U.S. fights "lawful" enemy combatants in Iraq

how very interesting...

In a rare battle between American and uniformed Iraqi forces, United States troops backed by fighter jets killed six Iraqi policemen and seven gunmen during a predawn raid in which they captured a rogue police lieutenant, the military said Friday.

al qaeda wasn't mentioned a single time in the entire article... however...

They said the captured lieutenant was a “high ranking” leader of a cell they suspected of having links to the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

if you can't get away with blaming al qaeda, go with the next best thing...

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Robert Parry on our fragile republic

robert parry writes on just how precarious the decision on al-marri really is and how bush might still have his claim to unfettered power upheld in the courts...

By a two-to-one margin, a federal appeals court has repudiated George W. Bush’s right to snatch a civilian off the streets of America and hold the person indefinitely without trial. But the makeup of the three-judge panel was a fluke, with two Clinton appointees comprising the majority.

The proportion of Republican appointees to Democrats on the full U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, is the opposite, eight-to-four Republican. So, the Bush administration retains high hopes that the full court will agree to review the case of Ali al-Marri and grant the President the authority he wants.

The case, which tests the limits of Bush’s claims to “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief, eventually is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court where Bush has four of nine justices solidly in his corner – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Assuming the roster of the Supreme Court remains the same, the swing vote is expected to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is considered a loyal Republican – the author of the December 2000 ruling awarding Bush the White House – but who has objected to some elements of Bush’s expansive presidential authority.

[...]

Civil libertarians hailed the al-Marri ruling as a significant defeat for Bush’s vision of an imperial presidency. But the fragility of the judicial consensus holding the line against the President's "plenary" powers signals that the battle to sustain the Founders’ vision of a Republic based on the rule of law and recognizing “certain unalienable rights” is far from over.

i was extremely gratified to see any court anywhere in the land standing up for our constitution and the historical principles of our judicial process, something it seems that the bush administration is dead-set on destroying... no, we aren't out of the woods, not by a long shot, but a step at a time is better than nothing...

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One of "THOSE" days

i'm casting about for posting material and am finding my heart just isn't in it... stories like fred thompson adding liz cheney to his a'buildin' campaign team just don't give me much hope... yesterday, i was buoyed by the story from the three-judge panel in richmond, ruling against "ememy combatant" status, but, ya know, i feel like i'm grasping at straws... bush, cheney, gonzo, and rove are still in place, people are still dying all over the damn place in iraq, and the bushies are still taking their daily dump on our constitution... maybe brother tim or jim can muster a bit more motivation than i can and give you something interesting to read and ponder... i'm gonna teach my class this evening and not think about anything else... (unless, of course, something BIG hits the fan...! LOL...)

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Four years in military custody as an "enemy combatant" without being charged gets whacked

hot damn...! the courts are coming out of their shell and starting to uphold the constitution and demonstrate the real value of our founders' insistence on separation of powers...

President George W. Bush cannot order the military to seize and indefinitely detain a Qatari national and suspected al Qaeda operative, the only person being held in the United States as an "enemy combatant," an appeals court ruled on Monday.

In a major setback for Bush's policies in the war on terrorism adopted after the September 11 attacks, the appellate panel ruled 2-1 the U.S. government had no evidence to treat Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri as an "enemy combatant." The court ordered him released from military custody.

"The government cannot subject al-Marri to indefinite military detention. For in the United States, the military cannot seize and imprison civilians -- let alone imprison them indefinitely," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote.

Al-Marri has been held in a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, for about four years without any charges.

The ruling sent the case back to a federal judge in South Carolina with instructions to direct the secretary of defense to release al-Marri from military custody within a reasonable period of time.

The government can transfer al-Marri to civilian authorities to face criminal charges, initiate deportation proceedings, hold him as a witness in a grand jury proceeding or detain him for a limited period of time under the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law.

i've just violated the fair-use rule by taking the entire nyt story, but, i gotta tell ya, this is HUGE... with recent events in guantánamo, powell speaking out yesterday, and now this, maybe there's some momentum building to get our country on track... this is good news... VERY good news...

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Still more on Omar Khadr

jeralyn at talkleft pointed me to this piece from the june 23, 2005, toronto star...

Canada's only known detainee in Guantanamo Bay is 18-year-old Omar Khadr. Documents filed in a Canadian court this week included two psychiatric assessments that concluded the teenager has a serious mental disorder and is at a high risk for suicide.

Khadr is the second youngest son of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was considered before his death in 2003 to be Canada's highest-ranking Al Qaeda financier with close ties to Osama bin Laden.

Omar Khadr was 15 when he was shot three times and captured at a suspected Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in July 2002, following a gun battle with U.S. troops.

In February, his U.S. lawyer told reporters the teenager had been used as a human mop to clean urine on the floor and had been beaten, threatened with rape and tied up for hours in painful positions at Guantanamo Bay.

that would explain the low affect described in my earlier post...

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More on the dismissal of charges against Khadr

we need to keep reminding ourselves that these people are human beings like us, with faces, feelings, and mothers who love them...



This is a photo of Omar Khadr,
taken before he was imprisoned,
handed out by his mother Maha
Khadr following a news conference
in Toronto on Feb. 9, 2005.
(AP Photo)

i posted on this as it was breaking, before i got my hands on the story of the reasons behind the dismissal...

The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system. The ruling immediately raised questions about whether the U.S. will have to further revise procedures for prosecuting prisoners, leading to major delays.

[...]

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier — and not as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant."

this is a tragedy of epic proportions... he spends five friggin' years in guantánamo, he's exposed to whatever horrors that place can dish out, his development is arrested, and he's probably suffering from serious emotional and mental distress... just read this and tell me if the lack of emotional affect strikes you as that of an emotionally healthy young man...

Khadr — who according to his former military attorney, Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey has the emotional age of a 16-year-old after five years imprisonment — seemed oblivious to the ruling. Khadr calmly watched the judge throw out the case — looking not at Brownback but at a computer screen at the defense table that showed a live TV broadcast of the proceedings. Khadr could see himself on the screen.

how very sad and how similar to jose padilla... what in god's name happens to them there...?

affect
n. (ăf'ĕkt')

1. Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: “The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect” (Norman Mailer).

and, after all THAT, they're gonna KEEP HIM THERE...!

But Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

this is totally and completely outrageous...

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