Slow in coming, far too late, but a small victory for our system of justice and the Constitution in Bush’s America:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Monday overturned a U.S. military tribunal’s enemy combatant designation for a Chinese Muslim at the Guantanamo Bay prison, its first ruling that gives a detainee a chance for release.
It ordered the U.S government to release or transfer Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the Uighur ethnic group, or to “expeditiously” hold a new military tribunal for him.
Parhat, who was captured in Afghanistan and who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for six years, is one of several Uighurs still at the prison. […]
The court also said Parhat can seek his immediate release before a U.S. District judge under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling this month that the detainees have the legal right to challenge their years-long confinement.
A key issue in the Parhat case was whether he had been involved in any activity that would justify designating him as an enemy combatant.
The government argued that Parhat was trained by a group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and that it has links to al Qaeda. That was enough to hold him, it said.
Parhat’s lawyers said he considered China, not the United States, the enemy, and that there was no evidence that he ever joined the group.
Finally, a court willing to say even the President needs evidence of some wrong doing before he can damn someone to the indefinite hell of detention at Guantanamo Bay. Let’s hope it is the beginning of the end for that foul stain on our Constitution and for the ludicrous theory that a President has the equivalent authority of the Divine Right of Kings, a theory supposedly discarded forever by America’s founding Fathers over 200 years ago.
The judicial branch is certainly our last hope. The legislative branch isn’t up to doing its job.
But I’m not holding my breath. Hope is not a plan.
Six damn years. I already miss the words George Carlin would certainly have delivered at the heads of those who derailed our justice system.
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Houzaifa fled to Pakistan, with the 17 other Uyghur men, in October of 2001 when the Uyghur village in Afghanistan was bombed. Initially taken in by Pakistani villagers, Houzaifa and the other Uyghurs were then sold by them to the U.S. military for a bounty. At the time, the U.S. military offered large sums of money – $5,000 or more – to anyone who handed over alleged “terrorists.” The United States blanketed Afghanistan and Pakistan with leaflets promising “wealth and power beyond your dreams” or “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” In a press briefing in November 2001, Secretary Rumsfeld praised this practice, stating that these leaflets were “dropping like snowflakes in December in Chicago.” Houzaifa was one of the many victims of this manufactured incentive.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."No matter how well I conceptually understand the larger pictures of what has been done, the individual stories like this still land hard and tell me Bush has robbed the soul from our integrity.