My title is the one word a military lawyer at Guantanamo has used to sum up the treatment of a hospital administrator from Sudan who is being held at Gitmo. This officer is going to testify at a hearing before the US Supreme Court on December 5th to determine whether the detentions of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, and the military status review hearings established and operated by the military at the prison are lawful. Naturally no American newspapers are reporting this story as of this morning, so I will refer you to this report by Leonard Doyle for The Independent for the details:
An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are “enemy combatants”.
The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as “unconscionable”. […]
The whistleblower’s testimony is the most serious attack to date on the military panels, which were meant to give a fig- leaf of legitimacy to the interrogation and detention policies at Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. The major has taken part in 49 status review panels.
“It’s a kangaroo court system and completely corrupt,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which is co-ordinating investigations and appeals lawsuits against the government by some 1,000 lawyers. “Stalin had show trials, but at Guantanamo they are not even show trials because it all takes place in secret.”
The army major has said that in the rare circumstances in which it was decided that the detainees were no longer enemy combatants, senior commanders ordered another panel to reverse the decision. The major also described “acrimony” during a “heated conference” call from Admiral McGarragh, who reports to the Secretary of the US Navy, when a the panel refused to describe several Uighur detainees as enemy combatants. Senior military commanders wanted to know why some panels considering the same evidence would come to different findings on the Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority in China.
When the whistleblower suggested over the phone that inconsistent results were “good for the system … and would show that the system was working correctly”, Admiral McGarragh, he said, had no response. The latest criticism emerged when lawyers investigating the case of a Sudanese hospital administrator, Adel Hamad, who has been held for five years, came across a “stunning” sworn statement from a member of the military panel. The officer they interviewed was so frightened of retaliation from the military that they would not allow their name to be used in the statement, nor to reveal whether the person was a man or woman.
(cont.)
Not surprising news that the military had rigged these enemy combatant reviews to ensure that no one gets out of Guantanamo unless the President “decides” to permit it. Yet every time I read of this absurd judicial process straight out of Kafka that has been erected to provide the Gitmo detainees “due process” under the law, the angrier I get. The day we allowed Bush to create the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and the other outposts of his “American Gulag” was the day we stopped being the United States of America in all but name.
I’ve long maintained that these detentions and military tribunals were unconstitutional. Sadly, legal maneuvers, stall tactics and a compliant lapdog Congress has allowed the Bush administration to avoid scrutiny of the unconstitutional nature of the detentions at Guantanamo, and the military hearings of detainee status which justify the inhumane treatment of all those being held there. Indeed, the use of torture against the detainees would exclude much of the “evidence” collected by the military in any legitimate court of law, even detainees who we know to have been involved with Al Qaeda.
This is why the whole affair is both a tragedy for the detainees, and a travesty of justice for all Americans. Innocent men are being held unjustly without due process, and guilty men cannot be tried and convicted in our federal courts for their crimes because the Bush administration used torture and other extra-legal means to gather evidence against them. It is clear that the use of torture against the detainees was the reason for constructing the prison at the Guantanamo Bay in the first place. The administration couldn’t hold them at a facility on US soil because that would allow the persons it intended to torture in violation of the 8th Amendment and the Geneva Conventions to have easy access to the federal court system. So instead they were placed in an off shore hell hole at a military base we lease from Cuba, and the military was designated by executive fiat to conduct any and all hearings. This illegal process was later confirmed by a gutless Congress which discarded the right of habeas corpus last year when it passed the Military Commissions Act in response to the first Supreme Court decisions which went against the Bush administration regarding these detentions.
In short, it’s always been about the torture. That is, to allow Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so many others play at being Jack Bauer of 24 in real life, Bush authorized the erection of this ugly edifice of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib, etc. of which Gitmo is simply the most prominent “adornment.” They descended into the pit of darkness and dragged us down with them. That is what 9/11 really changed. And that is the true horror of that radical act of terrorism: that we could so easily rid ourselves of the trappings of our constitutional democracy in the pursuit, not of liberty or happiness, but of security from a small band of thugs.
Well we all know the saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. It seems we get what we deserve in this life, or at least those who voted for Mr. Bush deserve. The rest of us, unfortunately, also must suffer the consequences of the fear and blind hatred represented by those votes. A tyrant and a war criminal as our ruler.