Army Judge Defies Obama, Won't Stop Gitmo Court

Just when you thought all's well, Gitmo's gonna be closed, we'll stop the insanity that Bush started with extralegal terror trials, torture, and "sexy" terrorist executions-to-be, and habeus corpus and the Army Field Manual will rule the rust, we hit a decidedly unexecutive bump in the road.

Obama issued, after all, an executive order freezing all Gitmo trials until next month, in order to review all the Geneva Convention-bashing stuff that may/may not have been going down. But now, an Army judge has defied those orders. Point blank. Just like that: "I'm not gonna do it, dude."

The chief judge of the Guantánamo war court Thursday spurned a presidential request to freeze the military commissions, and said he would go forward with next month's hearing for an alleged USS Cole bomber in a capital terror case.

Abd el Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian, faces a Feb. 9 arraignment on terror charges he helped orchestrate the October 2000 al Qaeda suicide bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors off the coast of Yemen.

Nashiri is now held at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba after years of CIA detention in which the agency has confirmed it waterboarded him in secret custody.

Yeah. and to make matters worse, this particular suspect has been tortured. Waterboarded. They're up front about it. So how did the judge justify defying a Presidential directive?

"On its face, the request to delay the arraignment is not reasonable," the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, wrote in his three-page ruling denying a prosecution request to delay Nashiri's first court appearance.

Wait! I thought President Obama was, like, the Commander-in-Chief. And this Army judge is, like, in the military, and under, like, his command.

And, oh, the judge added this remark:

"The public interest in a speedy trial will be harmed by the delay in the arraignment," Pohl also wrote.

So, let's get this straight. A directive from the Commander-in-Chief can be disobeyed because (a) a judge thinks it's "not reasonable", and (b) the judge thinks it will "harm" the "public interest". So the judge is making decisions to override the President. I wonder what this judge would say had someone done the same in defiance of, say, a Bush directive? Sounds very, very political to me...

And I'm not the only one surprised.

The decision stunned officials at the Department of Defense and White House, which had just begun to grapple with Obama's order to freeze the war court and empty the prison camps within a year.

"The Department of Defense is currently reviewing Judge Pohl's ruling," said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. ``We will be in compliance with the president's orders regarding Guantánamo."

It seems that the best way to comply with the freeze order is to dismiss the charges.

In other cases, the prosecutor has withdrawn the charges, without prejudice, meaning a new case could be brought at a later date.

Dismissing charges in a capital terror case may be hard to stomach for those dedicated to the GWOT. But judges are supposed to be "impartial."

Thursday, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero called the judge's order the work of Bush administration "hangers on" at the Defense Department who he accused of seeking to ``undercut President Obama's unequivocal statement to shut Guantánamo and halt the military commissions."

Pohl's order, he said, 'raises serious questions about whether Secretary of Defense (Robert) Gates is the `New Gates' or is the same old Gates under a new president. Gates certainly has the power to put a halt to these proceedings, and his lack of action demonstrates that we may have more of the same - rather than the change we were promised."

Retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kurt Lippold, who was commander of the Cole at the time of the attack, countered that the judge's ruling was ``a victory for the 17 families of the sailors who lost their lives on the USS Cole over eight years ago."

So it is really about politics. But it's also about avenging the Cole. Obama should make clear, publicly, that the freeze does not mean these guys will not face trial, just under new, unchallengeable, conditions. As it stands, what with the accused having been coerced under torture, it might be a more successful prosecution, hence also revenge for those who desire it, to be done the right way, as ordered by... the Commander-in-Chief.

Ah, the rule of law... those Bushies just can't let go...

Iraq's Guantanamo: Worse Than the Other Gitmo, and Over 20K Strong

It's one thing to say "end the war in Iraq." It's another thing to deal with the 21,000-plus (the number fluctuates) detainees it is holding there without charge and with fewer rights than Guantanamo detainees. What's going on, and what will happen?

This question is addressed in David Enders' great report on Camp Bucca in Iraq and the situation with detainees from the Iraq war.

Close to the Kuwaiti border, Bucca is the U.S. military's largest detention center in Iraq. About 80% of the detainees there are Sunni, not Shi'a, Muslim.

One of the biggest complaints is that the vast majority of detainees have not been charged with any crime. "Why don't the U.S. forces charge him if he has done something? Then at least we would know how long he will be here," said Hadia Khalaf, whose son Qusay was arrested in September 2007. "He was our provider," she said, reflecting the plight of many families who rely on extended family and charity to survive.

Since 2003, approximately 96,000 Iraqis have been officially detained by the U.S. military, with 100,000 more having been temporarily detained but never sent to a theater-level internment facility like Bucca. The other theater-level facility currently open is Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, which serves as the system's in- and out-processing center and holds about 3,000 detainees, including roughly 300 juveniles.

Yes, that's right. We're detaining juveniles in Iraq. Without charge. And God knows what else is happening to them. And the "300" figure was only about Camp Cropper. How many are at Bucca, a much larger facility. And what happens to the families whose provider in Iraq's tough economy is now in US detention without access to due process, without even being charged with anything.

The legal basis for detentions stems from a single line of a 2004 UN Security Council resolution, which has been renewed every year since by agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. This resolution, which gives the legal justification for continued U.S. military occupation, allows "internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security."

As you might imagine, the Iraqis are now happy about renewing this "right" and are working on negotiating another "contract" which would end the US's policy of detaining Iraqis without charge.

The Iraqi government has demanded that the U.S. military no longer be allowed to detain Iraqis without its approval. The State Department and White House have been largely mum about the discussions, while Maliki's office has regularly leaked parts of the agreement and says that the final sticking points are whether U.S. troops will continue to be immune from prosecution under Iraqi law and the extent to which the U.S. military will have to coordinate with and receive approval from the Iraqi government before launching operations.

Of course, whatever "imperative reasons of security" means is up to an unknown selection of folks on the ground. Not having to charge them with anything means we can essentially pick guys up and keep them at Bucca and elsewhere for as long as we like. This creates more humanitarian tragedy and resentment from the Iraqi people we claim to be "helping", not to mention being not the way it's supposed to be done. We're acting as if we are occupying in every way, shape and form.

Joseph Logan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa section, thinks an amnesty might be the answer. "If you don't have the evidence to transfer someone to the Iraqi system, it's probably the case that their outright release should be considered," Logan said.

"The U.S. is on the one hand claiming broad powers of detention, and at the same time is claiming the conflict is not a war or occupation," he said. "You can't have it both ways. If you want these completely unchecked powers of detention, you have to occupy the country again" -- that is, revert to the legal status the United States held before the 2004 UN resolution.

Detainees receive an initial review of their case before being sent to Cropper, but they are not allowed to attend it. The reviews are conducted by a panel of three U.S. military officers. Detainees are allowed to attend later reviews, but at no point are they given access to a lawyer.

Not only that, but there's no time limit. I mean, even the most heinous criminals get time limits (unless it's "life" or "death", but at least they know what it is). But these are people who may have just done something someone considered "suspicious." It's truly horrific.

Detention operations have been a rocky road. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 received the most coverage, but thousands of prisoners living in leaky tents outside the prison's "hard site" complained of lack of medical care, indifferent and at times hostile treatment from guards, inedible food and extreme weather, including flooding. American troops even admitted at the time that they believed more than 80 percent of those detained were innocent of wrongdoing. Recently released Iraqis, as well as Iraqi officials, say this statistic is probably still true.

Yes, our American troops didn't feel that these detainees were an "imperative" threat to security. But they can't do anything about it, and neither can anybody except ... Condoleeza Rice? Or Dick Cheney?

And what about torture?

Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 received the most coverage, but thousands of prisoners living in leaky tents outside the prison's "hard site" complained of lack of medical care, indifferent and at times hostile treatment from guards, inedible food and extreme weather, including flooding.

And then

Torture also certainly continued past 2004. On a visit to Abu Ghraib in March 2005 (it has since been closed), I saw a detainee who had been strapped to a chair and left in the pouring rain. Only after reading former interrogator Tony Lagouranis' book Fear Up Harsh did I learn this was a tactic used to induce hypothermia. At the time, the guards told me the prisoner had been restrained because he refused to stop throwing feces at his captors.

It's getting harder to find out about this issue, though.

None complained of abuse during detentions or interrogations once in Cropper or Bucca, though some said they had been beaten and roughly interrogated before being put into the theater-level system.

"The first three days they didn't give me any food," said Samir Mohamed, who was arrested in 2007 while driving between Damascus and Baghdad. He said he was blindfolded for three days while he was interrogated and beaten. "They put cigarettes out on me," he said. One U.S. soldier I spoke to who requested anonymity said the CIA maintained an off-the-books "black site" at Camp Anaconda near Balad as recently as mid-2007. I have not been able to confirm this independently.

And could all this actually be a side effect of the "Surge"???

But if the treatment once incarcerated is generally better than in the past, the intelligence that puts Iraqis there does not seem to be. "I was working as a guard at a gas station," said Jassim, who was arrested in August 2007, during the surge in Baghdad. "There were eight of us working as guards, and they lined us up and said, 'We'll take the first four.'" The U.S. military has admitted that the surge led to a surge in detainees as well, as a result of increased raids, which strained an already overcrowded system and elicited fresh reports of arbitrary detentions.

Plus, the military has admitted that some of the insurgents in detention have actually run their own courts inside the prison camps. This supposedly doesn't happen anymore, but the camps are run in a rather, shall we say, counterproductive way.

The first time Abu Wissam, 58, was arrested by U.S. troops was in a roundup in December 2003. He was arrested again in September 2007. He has spent most of the latest detention in Bucca's Camp 26, which is known as a takfiri camp, since takfiris -- Sunni Muslim extremists who consider Shiites to be heretics and non-Muslims -- have been allowed to run it. "Sometimes they wanted to punish a prisoner," Abu Wissam said. "They would put someone in the camp and tell the takfiris, 'This guy worked with the police.' The takfiris hate anyone who works with the Iraqi government or the Sahwa or the police."

In other words, the Sunni extremists are allowed to run one of the camps in Bucca. And, of course, they take revenge of anyone suspected of working with - you guessed it! - the Shi'a-dominated Bush-backed government. Genius at work! Whatever is going on here, I think there's some problems with the direction...

"The Sahwa people were scared to sleep inside," Abu Wissam said, referring to the movement of former Sunni resistance fighters who have made a marriage of convenience with the U.S. military since late 2006 to battle al Qaeda. He and other prisoners I interviewed said interrogations mostly focused on general questions. For Abu Wissam they were questions such as "did you fight against Israel" during the 1973 war -- apparently considered a mark of suspicion by U.S. interrogators but something that a member of the Iraqi army would have been shot for refusing to do. Abu Wissam said he was given a paper to sign, admitting guilt to a list of charges that included murder, attacking U.S. troops, kidnapping and sectarian cleansing. In July the U.S. military admitted that Islamic extremists had been running courts inside Bucca for years and had even carried out killings inside the prisons.

The whole thing is so incredibly confused and, of course, unjust. Is this part of the "democratization" of Iraq? Well, who cares, says the GOP, as long as we can tap into Iraqi oil? And did the detainees have a choice in signing the list of crimes they were guilty of? Did they have any idea what it was all about, or what the consequences would be?

Abu Wissam said he complained about the treatment, especially the fact that all prisoners suffered because of the actions of some. "I asked the American officer, 'Why do you treat all of us like takfiris?' and he said, 'You killed our friends. You are all takfiris.'"

Oh, Great! Collective punishment. Well, it seems to be the U.S. foreign policy of late, from sanctions on the people as punishment for acts of a government that will neither suffer significantly nor step down as a result from their power-seat, nor, of course, change their policies towards the U.S., which was the supposed whole point.

If that exchange suggests collective punishment of prisoners, the review process shouts it. Detainee review hearings at Camp Cropper are held in a sparsely furnished trailer. An Iraqi flag hangs on the wall, no doubt an unintended irony. Prisoners swear on a Quran before three U.S. officers, who read a list of accusations.

In one hearing I observed in early August, the defendant had been rounded up with relatives after a weapons cache was found nearby. The military strongly believed the young man's father was an insurgent, but the officers thought it was more than likely the accused had been picked up simply because he happened to be there. Regardless, it had been enough to hold him for at least four months.

"I just want to go back to school," the young man told the officers when given a chance to speak. "I have missed a year because of this."

"You're still young," one of the officers replied. "You'll have time to catch up."

Whereas in Guantanamo, detainees are held in Xtreme Security with hoods on, etc., in Camp Bucca, it seems to be more of a world within itself, where just simply being in it is the horrible thing, as there's no way out except what seems to be arbitrary, blind luck.

"I don't think that there is a law that covers what we're trying to do -- that is, to detain people indefinitely. There have been terrorist acts throughout history, so this war is never going to end," said retired Adm. John Hutson, a military law expert. "The 250 guys at Guantanamo can have habeas corpus, but the thousands of detainees elsewhere don't have any rights. I think we have focused like lasers on Guantanamo because it's iconic and it's 90 miles off our shore. But you can't make legal, diplomatic or moral distinctions based on the locale of the detainee. We've worried about Guantanamo, but there are more detainees elsewhere. Whatever rules we come up with have to apply across the board."

"This war is never going to end"! And these detainees will be detained "indefinitely"? Sounds like the message of John McCain and his 100 years plus occupation/war. The same officer, retired Col. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge, more or less, of Abu Ghraib, was more recently in charge of Bucca - until someone worse came in.

Bucca was originally slated to be shut down in late 2003, Karpinski said, before Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his staff, who were responsible for setting up Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo, took over from Karpinski. Karpinski said Miller told her he would "Gitmo-ize" the system, after which Abu Ghraib and then Cropper became the main center for interrogations.

"Bucca is holding this massive population of Iraqis who were hauled in and are security detainees that have no intelligence value. When you determine that they have no further intel value, you transfer them to Bucca," Karpinski said.

So what's the point?
Well, ominously, when Karpinsky asked Miller's attorney, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a simple question about "procedures", this is what she got:

"I asked her specifically about release procedures for the prisoners at Gitmo," Karpinski said, "thinking, naively, we might be able to learn something from their procedures. Beaver looked at me like I was crazy and arrogantly said, 'Release, ma'am? There is no release plan for our prisoners. Most, if not all of them, will spend every last day of their lives at Gitmo.'"

Folks, this is a POLICY, not a tactic or even a strategy. What does it say about justice in general or the U.S. in particular when it has a policy of permanently imprisoning people who are not its citizens, not citizens of countries at war with the United States, and who are not even accused of any crime, and have no recourse to justice, for the rest of their natural lives???

Outside Bucca, as the sun comes up, Ali, 12, reads a letter he has written to his father. "Dear Daddy, How are you? I hope you are doing well. I miss you so very much and I miss you taking me in your arms. Dear Daddy, we are all doing well, thank God! I pray that God gives me and Mommy and my sister Nour the patience to survive while you are absent. I asked God to help you and all the detainees with you to be released. Dear Daddy, you can rely on God, then on me, to take care of the house and the family. I cry every day, every day thinking of you. I pray for you because you are oppressed. I ask God to release you from your misery, Inshallah!"

Around him, other families, almost all women, wave pictures of the incarcerated. One woman has five sons inside; another has a brother who has been in U.S. prisons since 2004. Another says this is her twelfth visit to Bucca. All say that the trip is a financial strain. One says that without her husband to support her, she has been reduced to begging. Others complain that their children are depressed and failing in school.

It's the lack of rights, the total lack of justice, redress, or even hope for a legitimately-obtained freedom that smacks of ... anything, really, anything at all, but .... what used to be ... America. Who, or what, will bring these families back together? Does "family values" have to be just a slogan with closed doors on the rest of the world? It certainly means nothing whatsoever on the ground in Iraq. Rights, compassion, humanity, all that is so much "security risk".

Change these tactics or... say to America, the former bastion of freedom, justice and democracy...

R.I.P.

Gitmo Prosecutor Quits Over Suppressed Exculpatory Evidence

A whole lot of shakin' is going on in Guantanamo - Cheney's sham "Military Commissions" are further brought into question, and the whole "terror trial" thing is going down as an attempt to set up a kangaroo court to railroad minor "suspects", picked up in the GWOT's web of suspicion, into a conviction to "show off" their fake "success" in their propagandized "war on terror." Andy Worthington reports:

On September 24, Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo's Military Commission trial system, announced that Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor in the case of Mohamed Jawad (an Afghan -- and a teenager at the time of his capture -- who is accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep containing two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator), had asked to quit his assignment before his one-year contract expired.

Although Col. Morris attempted to explain that Lt. Col. Vandeveld was leaving "for personal reasons," the real reasons were spelled out in a statement issued by Vandeveld, in which (as the Associated Press explained) he wrote that "potentially exculpatory evidence" had "not been provided" due to a failure on the part of the "prosecutors and officers of the court." On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that he had stated, "My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery. I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain 'procedure' for affording defense counsel discovery."

Specifically, the denial of exculpatory evidence.

According to Michael Berrigan, the Commissions' deputy chief defense counsel, Vandeveld said that prosecutors knew that Jawad, who has always denied throwing the grenade, may have been drugged before the attack and that the Afghan Interior Ministry said that two other men had confessed to the same crime.

In his statement, Lt. Col. Vandeveld also wrote that he had wanted to offer Jawad a plea deal "that would allow him to receive rehabilitation after a short period of additional confinement," but that his commanding officers had disagreed. "As a juvenile at the time of capture," he wrote, "Jawad should have been segregated from the adult detainees, and some serious attempt made to rehabilitate him." He added, "I am bothered by the fact that this was not done."

Note that their high-profile cases are all juveniles "at the time of capture". The other high-profile no-holds-barred case being against Omar Khadr. This has not gone unnoticed.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld's departure -- and his reasons for leaving -- are another serious blow to the credibility of the Military Commissions, which were established by Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001. In June 2006, they were ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court, and although they were revived by Congress later that year in the much-criticized Military Commissions Act, they have never escaped accusations that they are a parody of justice, designed to secure convictions at all costs. Even so, Lt. Col. Vandevelt's profound criticisms of a system that imprisons juveniles instead of rehabilitating them, and that suppresses evidence relevant to the defense, is just part of a much darker narrative that has been unfolding for the last eighteen months.

That darker narrative includes torture, of course. And a refusal to relent from the untenable stance of denying justice to these accused who have fallen into Cheney's netherworld entitled "detainees."

From this perspective, an even more significant event was the Pentagon's announcement, on September 19, that Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann had been removed from his post as legal adviser to the Convening Authority overseeing the Commission process, which, as the Washington Post recently explained, is "a Pentagon office that is required to exercise a neutral role in the commissions, overseeing but not dictating the work of prosecutors and allocating resources to both the prosecution and defense."

Hartmann, a reservist whose civilian job is chief counsel to the Connecticut-based Mxenergy Holdings Inc., became the legal adviser to the Convening Authority in July 2007, and was also required to "exercise a neutral role." According to the rules set up for the Commissions, he was "supposed to provide impartial advice" to the Convening Authority (retired judge Susan Crawford), and was also supposed to "make an independent and informed appraisal of the charges and evidence," to help Crawford "decide whether charges proposed by the prosecutors are sufficient to go to trial."

So their confidence in the court system, especially of the Military Commissions, was so weak that they needed to hire an "outside point man" to advise their judge. Didn't they trust their own military judges? Aside from this point, was Hartmann's work done as proposed?

However, complaints arose almost as soon as Brig. Gen. Hartmann was appointed. Just two months after he took the job, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Col. Morris Davis, the Commissions' chief prosecutor, had filed a formal complaint alleging that Hartmann had "overstepped his mandate by interfering directly in cases." In a letter, Davis suggested that both he and Hartmann should resign "for the good of the process," adding, "If he believes in military commissions as strongly as I do, then let's do the right thing and both of us walk away before we do more harm."

Now Prosecutors are famous for liking to add convictions to their roster. But here you have a prosecutor who feels strongly that he's being pushed in one direction, and therefore unable to conduct a just and fair prosecution. It speaks volumes about the injustice from Cheney and Bush's side, and at the same time about the sense of justice and fairness from the military prosecution's side.

Officials who spoke to the Journal's Jess Bravin made it clear that Col. Davis was not alone in his complaints. A lawyer close to the process explained that, although Hartmann had complained that, after four years, the prosecution was "still unready to try cases," and was frustrated with their "can't do" approach, some of the prosecutors regarded him as "'micromanaging' cases he doesn't fully understand."

Brig. Gen. Hartmann escaped unscathed from Col. Davis' accusations -- and in fact it was Davis, alone, who resigned on October 4 -- and he also escaped censure the following month, when, during a pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr (the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was captured in July 2002), Khadr's defense team announced that they had just been informed of the existence of an eyewitness to the main crime for which Omar was being charged -- the death of a U.S. soldier in a grenade attack -- whose testimony could exonerate their client.

This was extraordinary enough, in and of itself, but what made the story particularly shocking was prosecutor Jeff Groharing's admission that, as the Los Angeles Times described it, "he had been prohibited from talking about the case" by Brig. Gen. Hartmann.

Which brings us to the question: who exactly put up Brig. Gen. Hartmann to this task? What exactly was his purpose? Since when does someone who is not a party to the court itself have the power to interfere with the prosecutor assigned to a case? Why did they impose Hartmann in a role that obviously is designed to practically force a conviction in a sham "trial"???? A sham trial of children???? Are these the terrorists we need to convict? Are we supposed to sacrifice our entire system of justice in order to convict some children of terrorism in order to say "Yes! This War Without End is justified!"????? It defies reason!

Finally, the judge presiding in Salim Hamdan's "terror" case (he was Osama bin Laden's driver), Capt. Keith Allred, disqualified Hartmann from the case, with this explanation:

"Telling the chief prosecutor (and other prosecutors) that certain types of cases would be tried and that others would not be tried, because of political factors such as whether they would capture the imagination of the American people, be sexy, or involve blood on the hands of the accused, suggests that factors other than those pertaining to the merits of the case were at play."

What a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's travesty of justice at Guantanamo and their sacrifice of any form of conscience for political gain. It's a pattern observed on every level - from the firing of prosecutors at the Justice Department to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and the disastrous conduct of the war, and to the destruction of Constitutional guarantees in everything from surveillance of the general public, to their free-for-all economic tsunami to sham justice at Guantanamo - nothing is safe from their lust for power at any cost.

In August, Hartmann was excluded from Mohamed Jawad's trial for the same reasons. Jawad's lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, told the judge, Col. Stephen Henley, that Hartmann "usurped the role of a prosecutor -- rather than acting dispassionately -- and pushed to get Jawad charged because the case involved battlefield bloodshed." Frakt also pointed out that Hartmann had "failed to turn over defense documents" to Susan Crawford, even though these documents "outlined mitigating circumstances that might have altered her decision to endorse the charges." He also secured testimony from an unlikely ally, Brig. Gen. Zanetti, the deputy commander of Guantánamo's Joint Task Force, who declared that Hartmann's demeanor was "abusive, bullying and unprofessional … pretty much across the board," and described his approach to the Commissions as, "Spray and pray. Charge everybody. Let's go. Speed, speed, speed."

Three weeks ago, Hartman was barred for a third time, this time from any post-trial review in Omar Khadr's case. The judge, Col. Patrick Parrish, had refused a request from Khadr's lawyers to disqualify Hartmann from involvement in Khadr's trial, but he barred Hartmann from reviewing it, in the case of a conviction, for the same reasons as those described above.

Sounds like a bullet train to me - but not a trial. Who put this Hartmann guy up to this? Don't we already know?? So what happened to Hartmann? Was it "3 Strikes & You're Out"? No! When the Angler has a hand, his point man gets a promotion. Yes! This sucker got promoted. And it's all hush-hush...

Instead of losing his job, however, Brig. Gen. Hartmann was actually promoted to a new post, as director of operations, planning and development for the Commissions, responsible, as the Associated Press put it, for "such activities as the hiring of dozens of lawyers and paralegals and ensuring there are adequate resources for the massive legal undertaking. His deputy, retired Army Col. Michael Chapman, took over as legal adviser.

This move may have partly been done to take Hartmann off the front burner, as the heat of public scrutiny turns on. But on the other hand, Hartman did just get a promotion, and so he now actually has more power, not less:

Although the Associated Press reported that the new job "takes Hartmann away from direct supervision of the prosecution," other observers were not convinced. The Washington Post reported that Human Rights Watch had stated that "instead of trying to clean up house, the Pentagon has now moved a man accused of bullying prosecutors to bring cases to trial and dismissing concerns about evidence being tainted by torture into a position coordinating all matters relating to the commissions."

This was no mere cover-up ploy. It was a redeployment designed to implant the curse of Cheney's torture and injustice schemes deeper into the system.

Speaking to the AP, Davis was even blunter, comparing Hartmann to a "cancer" that had infected the entire Commission process. "The only way to ensure cancer can do no harm," he said, "is to get it out of the body."

Or, in Hartmann's own words,

"I feel like it's an elevation, a promotion, because it recognizes … the exponential growth of the commissions," the AP reported him as saying, and in the Washington Post he claimed that, although "the recent court rulings forced him and others at the Pentagon to think about his role," the reason for his new assignment was that "he and his superiors thought that the 'best way to run the system was to take this more senior leadership position."

Hartmann continued crowing in comments to the Miami Herald. Likening his new job to that of a "chief executive officer at a 250-staff corporate headquarters," and adding that he "had no fixed budget," he declared that his biggest challenge was "to keep the process moving, really intensely." He added, "Everybody needs to start seeing more trials. I want those courtrooms to be as filled up as they can possibly be -- six days a week."

What "exponential growth"??? Are they planning to make it so nobody can stop them? Is this a train wreck Cheney is pushing down the track of no return?? What the hell kind of justice system wants more, more, faster, faster? A kangaroo court has much more justice than the US Military Commission system as Cheney would style it.

Andy Worthington agrees:

And when this is looked at in detail, Hartmann appears, shockingly, to be little more than a puppet (albeit a willing and hard-working one), whose reassignment is a reward to prevent him from being a sacrifice, which was bestowed upon him by his masters -- in the Pentagon, and in the Office of the Vice President -- who have no interest in establishing a fair or just process at Guantánamo.

Back to the case of Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing material support for terrorism in March 2007 in exchange for a nine-month sentence to be served in Australia, this was a deal cut directly by Dick Cheney to help his pal Australian Premier John Howard, who at the time was struggling to win re-election, by giving him Hicks as a "trophy". Fortunately for the Australians, they failed to be impressed and voted Howard out.

But how this deal went down shows Cheney's total disregard for the rule of law. He and his pro-torture cronies David Addington and two others - notably William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's General Counsel, who was "known for his tight connections with the Vice President's Office" - worked out a deal to get Hicks off the hook, cutting off the prosecutor who had just began his seering opening argument painting Hicks as a terrorist. The prosecutor, Col. Davis, didn't find out about the deal until it was done. So instead of the prosecutor cutting the deal, as in actual "courts", here the Vice President and some of his "connections" worked out a deal without the involvement of the prosecution whatsoever, essentially cutting him off at the pass.

Apparently then, this war on terror works as a publicity stunt. Sincere prosecutors, believing themselves to be on the legal end of the war on terror, work on prosecutions. In comes Cheney and cuts a deal without even telling them. The prosecutors have to find out how their cases ended up by reading the newspaper. So it isn't really a war on terror. It's a propaganda tool to gain power, political power, for "Friends of Cheney", Inc.

Col. Davis was also critical of the role played not only by Hartmann and Haynes, but also by Susan Crawford, and he was dismayed by what he described as Hartmann and Crawford's desire to conduct trials "behind closed doors." "Transparency is critical," he wrote, adding that it was "absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality," and pointing out that "even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with scepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors."

Davis also directed a specific attack at Susan Crawford, explaining that "the political appointee known as the 'convening authority' -- a title with no counterpart in civilian courts -- was not living up to that obligation." As he described it, Crawford, unlike her predecessor Maj. Gen. John Altenburg, whose staff had "kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality," had overstepped her administrative role, and "had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution's pre-trial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases." He continued: "Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused."

As if this were not enough, said in an interview with the Nation:

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, '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.'"

Rigged trials, torture: the legacy of Bush and Cheney... Let's hope this shake-up will uproot the designed injustice those enemies of justice are trying to institute. Let's hope the American public will realize what's going on and let them know...

Only if Cheney et al feel that there is an outcry against them, and that they will be held responsible for undermining justice, then and only then, is there a chance that we can climb out of this darkest era in U.S. history.

Don't Like Gitmo, Torture, Child Soldiers as US Legacy? Here's Something You Can DO...

Mohammad Jawad was a child soldier in Afghanistan when he was detained by US forces there in the so-called War on Terror and taken to Guantanamo where he was subjected to various types of torture - recognized as torture, that is, except to the Bush Administration, who call it anything else.
You can sign this petition to help in his behalf here. Read more about him and the petition (at bottom) below:
He was featured last May in Salon:

The U.S. government claims that Mohammed Jawad is an unlawful enemy combatant who tried to murder two U.S. soldiers and their translator in Afghanistan by tossing a grenade into their vehicle in December 2002.

But Maj. David Frakt, his military-appointed attorney, argues that Jawad -- who was a teenager of 16 or 17 at the time of his alleged offense (Jawad doesn't know his birth date) -- is a victim. He says Jawad was a homeless teenager who was drugged and forced to fight with Afghan militia, then abused by the United States, which transported him halfway around the world and imprisoned him at Guantánamo for five years without charge and is now using him as a guinea pig to test a new system of military justice with no regard to his initial status as a juvenile.

When Frakt arrived at Guantánamo to meet Jawad, he said he found a profoundly disturbed young man who was reluctant to talk. "Jawad is in an extremely fragile mental state," Frakt said in an interview following the hearing. "He has been here for so long -- he has essentially grown up in Guantánamo. He has lost track of time, lost touch with reality, and suffers from severe depression. And he doesn't believe he can get justice from the military commissions."

The fact that he was a child soldier was deliberately ignored by the Bush Administration. The US bandies the words "freedom" and "justice" around as if they were purely propaganda tools. Care about freedom? So what about exposing a minor, whose transition to adulthood occurred in the worst of all possible conditions, to torture and human rights abuse? Is this the way the US fights for democracy and freedom?

The United States has acknowledged holding eight teenagers at Guantánamo, but although some of them were given special housing and educational opportunities and were eventually released, the U.S. has ignored Jawad's status as a juvenile.

But Donald Rumsfeld, talking the Cheney line, lied about this:

At a press conference in April 2003, when the “child prisoners” story first broke, Donald Rumsfeld pointedly described the juvenile detainees as “not children,” and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that they “may be juveniles, but they’re not on the Little League team anywhere. They’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team, and they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason –- for our safety, for your safety.”

Safety? When we're becoming a human rights-abusing, rogue nation? It's worth taking a brief look at Jawad's life story, which has been largely ignored:

Jawad is an illiterate Afghan from a poor Pashtun family with no ties to the Afghan government. According to Frakt, Jawad's father died during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His mother remarried, and the family fled to Pakistan. Jawad spent his childhood years in a refugee camp and was educated at a local madrassa where all the teaching is conducted orally. He never learned to read or write.

Frakt says that when Jawad was 13, his family kicked him out and told him he needed to find a job. He spent much of those years hanging around a mosque looking for work. Sometime in 2002, Jawad was told he could have a job helping eradicate land mines in Afghanistan, so he returned to his native country. Once he arrived, however, Frakt says he was recruited by the local militia, drugged and forced into combat. Soon after, he was arrested by the Afghan police and handed over to the Americans.
Unlike most of the detainees at Guantánamo, Jawad was never provided a "habeas counsel," that is, a civilian lawyer to file a petition of habeas corpus on his behalf. Until he was charged this year, he was virtually unknown to the world.

Frakt said that his meetings with Jawad have been difficult, in part because Jawad doesn't understand the legal process, and in part because Jawad doesn't trust anyone in a U.S. military uniform, which Frakt is obligated to wear when he visits his client. "It is difficult to establish a trusting relationship with a detainee who has suffered so much and been detained by the U.S. military for five years," Frakt said. "He has a natural distrust of me, and he is not sure that I am here to help him."
...
From the government's point of view, Jawad's is a seemingly straightforward case. The prosecution has located eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the Afghan teenager throw the grenade. In addition, it says it has a signed confession from Jawad.

But Frakt says the case isn't nearly as straightforward as the government alleges. He says that the prosecution chose to prosecute Jawad because it viewed his as a "sexy" case -- Jawad is a defendant with "blood on his hands," in the government's view, which is something the American public understands better than something more abstract, like charges of material support for terrorism.

In other words, this is a show prosecution, politically motivated. Its purpose is not the administration of justice - not at all! - but a tool to be used to convince the American public that Bush's policies are justified, that we are bringing "terrorists" to "justice" and hence "securing America". While in fact, what we are doing is the diametrical opposite: undermining the very fabric of our justice system, democracy, and the rule of law, especially as it is applied internationally.

While Frakt acknowledges that the prosecution has witnesses who saw his client throw the grenade, he says the defense has also located witnesses who say the teenager appeared to be drugged at the time. As for the confession, Frakt says it is in Farsi -- a language Jawad does not speak. And the "signature" on it is in the form of a thumbprint, because Jawad does not read or write.

Frakt hopes to be able to make these arguments on Jawad's behalf if or when the case goes to trial. In the meantime, Frakt says has serious reservations about Jawad's ability to aid in his defense because of his fragile mental state -- something that was evident when Jawad himself addressed the court this month.

When the judge asked Jawad if he would like to make a statement, the young man spoke for about 20 minutes, saying that he didn't understand why he was at Guantánamo and why he was being punished. As he described his ordeal -- of being flown from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, locked in a steel cage, moved from cell to cell in the middle of the night, and sometimes being kept in a cell that had bright lights on 24 hours a day -- he said he had lost track of time and couldn't remember when or for how long he was held in each camp. Sometimes he stopped to rub his head and seemed to forget what he was saying in mid-sentence.

When Jawad finished his statement, Frakt requested that his client be taken out of the maximum security facility where he is currently housed -- where he is confined to a windowless cell at least 22 hours a day -- and moved to a "quiet, restful place where he can rehabilitate." He also requested that Jawad be examined by a mental health professional.

The judge told Frakt to put the request in writing and said that he would consider it. But it remains unclear whether the judge at the military commissions has the authority to order military officials at the detention facility at Guantánamo to do anything.

Now, finally, there is something we can do about it.

Valtin has put up this letter and petition to sign as well as this article explaining what the petition is about and what it can accomplish:

Last week I publicized the extraordinary appeal campaign for Guantanamo detainee Mohammad Jawad initiated by his military attorneys. Jawad, who was arrested as a teenager in Afghanistan in December 2002, is the first child soldier to be tried as a "war criminal" in modern times. In U.S. custody, he has suffered beatings, threats, physical isolation, sleep deprivation, been subjected to 24-hour bright lights, and more. His attorneys have called for letters to be written to the Convening Authority at Guanatanamo, asking them to withdraw and dismiss the charges against Jawad.

Now, his attorneys have initiated an online petition campaign in his behalf. You can follow this link to go straight to the petition. Please sign it and pass the info on to whomever you can.

Please click the link above and sign the petition. It's a small thing we can do to try and unbuild the system of atrocities Bush/Cheney have put in place. It's a way we can try to save the life of a forgotten victim of that system, a system that puts America to shame.

Gitmo Now Breeding Ground for Terrorists

According to this article,

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists,
Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals,
conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam
- thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them - and then housing
them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.
Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar
in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo
enraged at America.
The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, acknowledged that senior militant leaders gained influence and control in his prison.
"We have that full range of (Taliban and al Qaida) leadership here, why would they not continue to be functional as an organization?" he said in a telephone interview.
"I must make the assumption that there's a fully functional al Qaida
cell here at Guantanamo."

Congratulations, neocons! Now we won't run out of enemies when we need them, so we can fight more cool wars and ruin more economies and increase the gap between rich and poor which should create the huge vacuum we need to survive as neocon "profligate conservatives"!

Genius!

Omar Khadr Lawyer: Gitmo Interrogators told to Trash Notes

San Juan, Puerto Rico - The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.
The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.
Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevents him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions. He said he will use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Khadr.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.

British Court "Forces Government" to Hand Over Torture Docs in Gitmo Case

Here it is, from the Guardian's mouth:

(below is the article in its entirety, with my emphasis)

A British resident facing a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay has won a battle in a British court to force the government to hand over documents showing he was tortured into confessing he was a terrorist.
Binyam Mohamed, once a cleaner in Kensington, west London, is accused by the US of being an al-Qaida terrorist intent on the mass murder of civilians.
Yesterday it emerged that the high court had rejected a British government attempt to avoid a court hearing which would decide whether it should reveal evidence showing Mohamed was tortured by the US.
Mohamed, through his lawyers, who have visited him in Guantánamo, alleges he was "rendered" to Morocco, where his torture included his genitals being slashed.
The high court found the UK government supplied America with information to interrogate Mohamed and said the hearing should be held as soon as possible.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, said: "I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco."

Convicted for Unlawful Free Speech!: 34 Gitmo Protestors

According to this important report from Alternet:

Thirty-four Americans arrested at the Supreme Court on January 11, 2008
were found guilty after a three-day trial which began on Tuesday, May 27th in
D.C. Superior Court. The defendants represented themselves, mounting a spirited
defense of their First Amendment rights to protest the gross injustice of abuse
and indefinite detention of men at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.
Charged with "unlawful free speech," the defendants were part of a larger
group that appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 11 -- the day marking
six years of indefinite detention and torture at Guantanamo. "I knelt and prayed
on the steps of the Supreme Court wearing an orange jumpsuit and black hood to
be present for Fnu Fazaldad," said Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner from
Asheville, NC who provides health care for people with HIV.

Wait a minute! "Unlawful Free Speech"???? Doesn't the US Constitution prohibit passing any law that curtails Americans' right to free speech? Especially when that free speech right is used to express an opinion? Especially an opinion about a government policy? Isn't that a basic right guaranteed to all US citizens??? What does this mean?????

According to one of the convicted protestors:

Defendants and witnesses argued that they did not expect to be arrested at
the Supreme Court, "an internationally known temple to free speech." Ashley
Casale, a student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told the court, "I am
19 -- the youngest person in this courtroom--and I come on behalf of all the
prisoners at Guantanamo who were younger than I am now when they were detained.
According to the U.S. Constitution we have a right to petition the government
for a redress of grievances and Guantanamo Bay prison is beyond grievous."

According to Historian Michael S. Foley, a professor at the City University of New York:

if "you told me that the defendants would be arrested for 'unlawful free
speech' just twenty feet from where the Justices decide First Amendment cases,
I'd say you were 'crazy.'"

According to Arthur Laffin, an attorney at Gitmo in his closing statement at the January Guantanamo Trial:

My name is Arthur Laffin and I am representing Mane'I al Otaybi, a Saudi
national who was 25 years old when he was taken into U.S. custody in
Afghanistan. He died at the Guantanamo military prison on June 10, 2006 of a
reported suicide. To date, there has been no independent investigation of his
death or the others who have died at
Guantanamo. We remember these dead prisoners in a special way here in this court today.
The government has asserted that this case is not about Guantanamo. We respectfully and vehemently disagree. In our defense, we have to put forth to this court overwhelming evidence that the U.S. government has engaged in criminal conduct. What is at issue here is: what do citizens do when all three branches of government are in violation of divine law, international law, and its own Constitution? When habeas corpus rights are denied to persons, when persons are held indefinitely
without being charged, when persons are tortured by U.S. personnel in violation
of the Geneva Conventions and the Eighth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, we
citizens have a right and a duty to petition the government and to seek redress.
This is what we defendants did on January 11.

According to Usama Abu Kabir, a Guantanamo prisoner, who expressed himself in this poem:

IS IT TRUE
By Usama Abu Kabir (Guantanamo Prisoner)
Is it true that
the Grass grows again after the rain?Is it true that the Flowers will rise up in
the Spring?Is it true that the Birds will migrate home again?Is it true that the
Salmon swim back up the stream?
It is true. This is true. These are all
miracles.But is it true that one day we'll leave Guantanamo Bay?Is it true that
one day we'll go back to our homes?I sail in my dreams, I'm dreaming of
home.
To be with my children, each one part of me;To be with my wife, and the
ones that I love;To be with my parents, my world's tenderest hearts.I dream to
be home, to be free from this cage.
But do you hear me, O Judge, do you hear
me at all?We are innocent, here, we've committed no crime.
Set me free, set
us free, if anywhere still--May justice, compassion remain in this world!

Only those with a conscience will be moved.
Or join with Witness Against Torture and keep working to shut Gitmo and the whole "Homeland Security" torture racket down.

Omar Khadr Update: Evidence of Innocence

Guantanamo's "child terrorist" may have a strong legal defense, according to recent reports: the U.S. soldier Omar Khadr is accused of killing may have been killed not by Omar Khadr, but by friendly fire. Imagine, after Khadr was tortured and imprisoned at the infamous and cruel Guantanamo prison for alleged terrorists as an "enemy combatant", it may turn out that he was innocent completely of the alleged crime. Bear in mind, he was forcibly detained at age 15 to allegedly protect Americans from "terror".

Lt. Cmdr William Kuebler told CTV Newsnet that during the discovery process
of Khadr's legal proceedings, the U.S. government released interviews from
American soldiers who said they were lobbing grenades into the compound where
army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer was killed in July 2002. ...

"As the process unfolds, we are learning the government's case against
Khadr gets weaker and weaker," Kuebler said. "It departs from the mythical
account that was originally sold to the Canadian government and public that Omar
Khadr must have been guilty of throwing a hand grenade because he was found
alive in the compound . . . (as) today we learned that U.S. soldiers were
throwing hand grenades into that compound."
"Given the fact there were no
eyewitnesses to Khadr throwing a hand grenade (friendly-fire) is yet another
possibility."

Of course, the government will do everything in its power to railroad Khadr into a conviction, but we hope an international outcry, and perhaps a domestic outcry as well, could make those whose hands are bloody in this quagmire think twice and give this defendant the same rights accorded to other human beings: the presumption of innocence.

Or are all principles to be trashed in the interest of fear?

New Book on Omar Khadr Gets Reviewed

Check out this review of Guantanamo's Child, by Michelle Shephard (John Wiley & Sons Canada), a great read on Omar Khadr's life.

Why Do 5 Former Secretaries of State Say Close Gitmo?

This just came in from truthout: Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright all agreed that Guantanamo should be closed.

James Baker went on to say:

"It gives us a very, very bad name, not just internationally," he said. "I have
a great deal of difficulty understanding how we can hold someone, pick someone
up, particularly someone who might be an American citizen - even if they were
caught somewhere abroad, acting against American interests - and hold them
without ever giving them an opportunity to appear before a
magistrate."
The former secretaries of State also urged that the U.S. open a line of dialogue with Iran, each saying it was important to maintain contact with adversaries and allies alike.

Iran? And what about Iran? Do you mean we shouldn't take McCain's word and "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"?

Baker suggested the dialogue (with Iran) could center on a common dilemma,
saying a "dysfunctional Iraq, a chaotic Iraq, is not something that's in the
interest to Iran. There's every incentive on their part to help us, the same way
they did in Afghanistan."
Kissinger urged an open - if delicate - line of communication with
Iran. "One has to talk with adversaries," said Kissinger, who served the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Didn't think the old guy had it in him. Does that mean talk to .... terrorists, too? They are "adversaries", so "one has to talk" with them. So where were they when Gitmo was put in place as Our Torture Chamber?