Remember when Bush scheduled all those Guantanamo Bay military tribunal “war crimes” trials of alleged terrorists evildoers for October to give McCain a boost with the voters? Well the trials are still going on, though no one in the media is paying much attention to them. And guess what? They aren’t exactly getting the results the Bush administration expected:
MIAMI (Reuters) – The Pentagon official overseeing the Guantanamo war crimes court dismissed all charges against five prisoners on Tuesday, including a British resident who says he falsely confessed to a radioactive “dirty bomb” plot while being tortured.
All five cases were assigned to military prosecutor Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who quit his Guantanamo assignment last month because he said the U.S. government had withheld information that could help clear an Afghan defendant in an unrelated case.
The Defense Department gave no reason for dropping the charges but said new prosecutors had been appointed to review the cases and could refile the charges later. […]
Mohamed, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, had said repeatedly in court documents that he is innocent and gave false confessions while being tortured in a Moroccan prison. He had been transferred there extrajudicially and held for 18 months before being sent to Guantanamo.
He said he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels and told interrogators what they wanted to hear so they would stop. […]
“This is more of the Guantanamo farce, sadly. Instead of delivering justice, the military tries to hide all the mistakes and crimes that have been committed, including 18 months of torture of Mr. Mohamed in Morocco,” [Mohamed’s civilian attorney] Stafford Smith said by e-mail.
Six military prosecutors have quit the Guantanamo court in the last four years. Some said the U.S. government sought to use evidence obtained through torture while one alleged the trials were tainted by political interference.
“The implosion of these five prosecutions painfully underscores how the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies have failed to render justice in any sense of the word,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
What a waste. All that torture, all those unlawful detentions, all those Geneva conventions broken, all our national good will and our reputation squandered and they still can’t get a conviction.
Prosecutors drop charges for only one reason: They have no fricking case! None. Nada. The only evidence they likely had were confessions obtained by torture. Which was why the previous Military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who was assigned to their cases quit. He didn’t want to take part in any damn show trial to convict people with evidence that he knew was tainted. He didn’t want to be a participant in something so immoral, so illegal, so disgusting and so unjust as what the Bush administration had ordered the Pentagon to do. And I guess no one else among his fellow prosecutors was willing to take up the ball and run with it, either. At least not before the election. Lawyers aren’t stupid. They know participating in such illegal, rigged trials is a violation of international law, of US law and of the oath they took as attorneys. Some of them still want to have a career after Gitmo is shut down.
Oh, but what a far greater waste for the detainees who are still imprisoned at Gitmo. Years in a hellhole of a prison. Constant abuse. Torture. Trumped up charges. And now all charges dismissed because their prosecutor had a conscience, but for how long? Because don’t expect President Bush to let any of these poor, miserable brutalized prisoners go. He’ll let the next administration take the blame for releasing “terrorists.” Count on it.
