SUMMARY: A new exhibit in New York shares art from an unlikely place, Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. Current and former detainees have created work that represent their experiences as prisoners -- even episodes of torture -- often using whatever nontraditional materials they can find. Special correspondent Arun Rath reports.
SUMMARY: President Obama announced plans Tuesday to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, asserting that its existence undermines national security. The proposal -- which would send the facility’s remaining 91 detainees to domestic U.S. sites -- would fulfill the president’s 2008 promise to close the prison, but Congressional Republicans have been vocal in their opposition.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): From President Obama today came a fresh appeal to — quote — “close a chapter at Guantanamo.” From Republicans came an outright refusal. It all focused on a fight that’s gone at least as long as he’s been President.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay doesn’t advance our national security. It undermines it.
GWEN IFILL: For the President, it may be his final chance to keep a 2008 campaign promise, shutting down the military prison at Guantanamo.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit. It drains military resources, with nearly $450 million spent last year alone to keep it running, and more than $200 million in additional costs needed to keep it open going forward for less than 100 detainees.
GWEN IFILL: At its peak in 2003, Guantanamo held 680 detainees. Today, 91 prisoners remain at the detention facility; 35 are expected to be transferred out by this summer.
The President’s new proposal would send the remaining detainees to an unspecified facility inside the United States. It speaks of 13 potential sites, including civilian prisons and military bases, but makes no recommendation.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The notion of having terrorists held in the United States, rather than in some distant place, can be scary. But part of my message to the American people here is, we’re already holding a bunch of really dangerous terrorists here in the United States, because we threw the book at them, and there have been no incidents. We have managed it just fine.
GWEN IFILL: Then-President George W. Bush first ordered foreign terror suspects held at Guantanamo after 9/11.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.
GWEN IFILL: But in one of his first acts as President, Mr. Obama signed an executive order to shut it down. Today, he pointed out that, early on, the decision appeared to have bipartisan backing.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: My predecessor, President Bush, to his credit, said he wanted to close it. It was one of the few things that I and my Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, agreed on.
GWEN IFILL: But McCain and others have never backed this President’s solution, and have even passed a law that would bar moving detainees to American soil.
SUMMARY: Following President Obama’s announcement that he will fulfill his longstanding promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Capitol Hill lawmakers have been torn between support and opposition. Gwen Ifill talks to Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) for their perspectives on the proposed shutdown and what it could mean for the detainees.
SUMMARY: In 2001, Mohamedou Slahi was arrested in Mauritania for suspected connections to a bomb plot. He wound up at Guantanamo, and remains there without ever being charged. After a legal battle over his journal, "Guantanamo Diary" has been published, detailing isolation, beatings, sexual abuse and humiliation. Hari Sreenivasan interviews editor Larry Siems and Slahi's attorney Nancy Hollander.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Some two weeks after 9/11, Mohamedou Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer, was arrested at his home in the North African country of Mauritania. He was questioned by FBI agents and then released.
In November of that year, he was re-arrested for suspected connections in a plot to bomb the United States. What followed was a harrowing journey through the American national security apparatus post-9/11, from Mauritania to Jordan to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, finally to the U.S. prison site at Guantanamo Bay. He remains there today, 13 years later, with no charges filed against him.
In 2005, he began a journal, which was confiscated by prison guards and deemed classified. After a seven-year legal battle, a federal judge declassified the material, although some sections remain redacted.
Last week, Little, Brown and Company published “Guantanamo Diary,” in Slahi details those first years of imprisonment, including isolation, beatings, sexual abuse, and humiliation.
Joining me now are Slahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, and the book’s editor, Larry Siems.
SUMMARY: The exchange of five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has raised larger questions about prisoners being transferred from Guantanamo Bay. In all, 149 detainees from 19 countries still remain at the prison camp. For debate on what’s preventing the closure of the detention facility, Judy Woodruff turns to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution and Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): So, where do things stand at Guantanamo today? In all, 149 detainees still remain at the prison camp from 19 different countries; 78 have been cleared for transfer or repatriation to their homelands. Of the 71 detainees not cleared for transfer, the Department of Defense expects 20 will be prosecuted before military commissions.
The 51 remaining prisoners have been deemed by the administration as too dangerous to release; however, there is not enough evidence to charge them with specific crimes.
To sort through these numbers, and the complications of closing the detention facility at the Naval base, we get two different views.
Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo.” And Baher Azmy, he is legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. It’s an organization that currently represents 10 detainees at the prison.
I’m marking the 12th anniversary of the abomination that is Guantanamo with a couple of repostings related to how the Bush administration, with the connivance of key members of the press and the human rights community, sold a continuation of torture as an end to torture.
Such a reposting seems necessary as the entire press, human rights groups, and blogging world continues to ignore the ongoing issue of torture via interrogations. While indefinite detention, forced cell extractions aka beatings, and the painful forced-feeding of hunger strikers still garners attention, and rightly so, the fact the U.S. continues to have an official policy of torture in its interrogation manual continues to be ignored, even though it is the most important issue about torture facing America today.
Eschewing the worst-looking forms of torture, like waterboarding, in 2006, at the same time that “high-value detainees” like Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah were transferred out of the CIA black sites and sent to Guantanamo, the U.S. put out a new Army Field Manual (AFM) with instructions on interrogations that claimed to be “humane.”
Origin of AFM Rewrite Out of Ashes of Abu Ghraib Scandal
Only recently have I found the possible origin of the new AFM’s drafting in the August 2005 recommendations of a Joint Chiefs of Staff panel subsequent to the military investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal. (See pg. 315-16 of this document)
Recommend a policy-level review and determination of the status and treatment of all detainees, when not classified as EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War]. This review needs to particularly focus on the definition of humane treatment, military necessity, and proper employment of interrogation techniques. (e.g. boundaries or extremes)….
Recommend study of the DoD authorized interrogation techniques to establish a framework for evaluating their cumulative impact in relation to the obligation to treat detainees humanely.
The study of “authorized interrogation techniques” was tasked to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone.
But a number of the new techniques that ultimately showed up in the newly written AFM were not humane at all. In fact, they amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading behavior. Over the years various human rights groups recognized this and came out publicly for changes to the AFM.
The AFM made changes to its text that allowed wider latitude in use of drugs in interrogations, while eliminating prohibitions against sleep deprivation and stress positions that had been in the pre-2006 AFM. Even worse, a category of prisoners that were not considered subject to Geneva Convention POW protections was singled out for a special kind of interrogation “technique,” as described in the manual’s Appendix M.
Appendix M allowed for use of isolation for 30 days, and potentially indefinitely; sleep deprivation for up to 30 days, but potentially indefinitely; manipulation of environment and diet (so long as it wasn’t “extreme”); and forms of sensory deprivation, so long as every form of sensory input wasn’t affected.
There was very little interest in whether or not or how these new techniques were being used. In fact, no one had apparently even thought to ask the government until I did in January 2010 whether or not Appendix M had even been used. Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense confirmed it was using Appendix M interrogations at Guantanamo.
More surprising was my discovery, confirmed by a DoD spokesman, that the use of the Appendix M torture techniques was approved in a Bush-era Office of Legal Council memorandum, and left in place by the Obama administration despite claims that all such memos were withdrawn in January 2009. Even to this day, in a massive political failure, not one human rights group or legal organization has recognized this fact.
The Torture Never Stopped
Intense abusive interrogations continue. We know from a filing by Omar Khadr in his Canadian court case that prior to release from Guantanamo to Canadian authorities, and shortly after his plea deal with Military Commissions authorities in October 2010, Khadr was subjected to prolonged interrogation that likely was conducted, given the key presence of the use of isolation, to Appendix M parameters: “Following the Pre-Trial Agreement, the Americans transferred Omar to a maximum security detention facility restricted for prisoners convicted of offenses. Omar was thrown back into solitary confinement and continued to be subjected to months of prolonged interrogations consisting of a sequence of 9 hours of interrogation per day for 9 days at a time.”
With an even dozen years of crimes at Guantanamo — fully over 1/3 of them under the auspices of the Obama administration — I think it’s time to review just how consensus around torture takes place in actuality. As we shall see, it is a complex story, involving media manipulation, psychological effects such as denial, and subordination of human rights to party politics and an achingly slow platform of reformist change. I say “consensus” because silence about all this amounts to consensus.
The following was published at Alternet and my own blog, Invictus, in January 2009. (My first writingrecognizing torture in the AFM goes back to the introduction of the new manual in September 2006, when I wrote under my pseudonym Valtin) In a day or two, I will publish part two, which will look at how the foreign press saw through what DoD was doing, and how a major blogging news and opinion site helped cover that up.
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How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Includes Torture
A January 17 [2009] New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation’s interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented “a good start.” The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder’s statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a “good start,” what comes next?
The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA)
According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual “was pushing the limits on legal interrogation.” Anonymous military sources called the procedures “a back-door effort” to undermine McCain’s efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.
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There’s been quite a bit of media attention directed toward Skinny Puppy over the past week following revelations that the industrial band’s music was allegedly used during the interrogations of “war on terror” suspects detained at Guantanamo. Band members said they were informed in March 2013 by ex-Guantanamo guard Terry Holdbrooks [see update] that its songs were used as a form of torture at the detention facility. Following that disclosure, Skinny Puppy drafted a $666,000 invoice for the U.S. government for using its songs. But the band never sent the invoice. [See update 2.]
Despite all of the news coverage Skinny Puppy has received over the past week revolving around the invoice, it appears that reporters never bothered to ask members of the band for a copy of the document. But I did. Here it is (at top). It’s dated March 7, 2013 and addressed to “Guantanamo Intelligence.”
In an interview Wednesday afternoon with HuffPostLive, Kevin “Ogre” Ogilvie, Skinny Puppy’s lead singer, discusses the story behind the invoice, how the band arrived at the $666,000 figure, and gives a shout out to yours truly for trying to obtain information via the Freedom of Information Act about the use of songs during interrogations at Guantanamo. (Segment starts at 21:51).
UPDATE (2/7/14): Former Guantanamo guard Terry Holdbrooks told me he first met Skinny Puppy in 2011 and interviewed band members. It was during this 2011 interview that he informed them that their music was used at Guantanamo as a form of torture. The issue resurfaced in early 2013 when the band was working on a documentary and that’s when the invoice was created.
UPDATE 2 (2/7/14): Band members said they “recently” mailed a copy of the invoice to the Department of Defense and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which had played a role in developing and overseeing some of the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The Pentagon announced a significant milestone was reached this week in the long saga to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay. The last three ethnic Uighurs from China were released and sent to Slovakia. A total of 22 Uighurs were captured after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
They were found not to be a threat, and a judge ordered them freed in 2008, but the U.S. struggled to find a place to send them. All told, nine detainees were transferred in the month of December.
So, just who has been released and under what conditions? And what will happen to the remaining 155 prisoners?
For that, we turn to the State Department's special envoy for Guantanamo closure, Cliff Sloan.
Cliff Sloan, welcome to the NewsHour.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So there was a slump in the release of prisoners for a period of about two years, until you came in this summer. Just in the last month, as we have said, several released.
What's changed since you have been there?
CLIFF SLOAN, U.S. State Department Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure: Thank you. Happy to be here.
It was just three weeks ago that President Obama made a persuasive case for closing the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. He described a military prison that costs too much, has become an international embarrassment, and is filled with "people who have been charged with no crime."
The vision the president outlined has been embraced by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, civilians and military personnel. And yet, GOP lawmakers in Congress appear to be going backwards.
Last week, House Republicans once again barred the Obama administration from transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Today, against a backdrop of a terrible hunger strike, a Democratic effort to do the right thing was easily defeated in the face of mindless, reactionary conservative opposition.
"These terrorist detainees pose a very real danger to our security in America. They mean us real harm," said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a veteran of the Iraq war who called closing Gitmo "appeasement."
"Who are these detainees? They are not innocent goat herders swept up by marauding United States military, of which I was a part, and of which I detained numerous potential terrorists," said Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), referring to his service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) argued that moving the prisoners to the United States would paint targets for terrorists "on every elementary school, every shopping mall, every small business" in the area where they end up being housed.
Arguments like these predictably won the day in the lower chamber. Rep. Adam Smith's (D-Wash.) proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, calling for a plan to close the detention facility was crushed on a 174 to 249 vote.
What about the dozens of prisoners who've already been cleared by military and intelligence officials for transfer? What about the hundreds of terrorists who are already locked up safely in American prisons? What about the extent to which this facility undermines our standing and credibility on the international stage?
According to 249 members of the House, these facts just don't matter.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And we turn now to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where a protest by prisoners continues to grow.
Ray Suarez reports.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): More than half the detainees at the Guantanamo prison are now on hunger strike. Government figures disclosed this weekend show 84 of the 166 captives at the facility are now participating. A smaller number began the protest in early February. They objected to their living conditions and to alleged mishandling of the Koran by military guards.
They also cited the legal limbo many have been held in for a decade or more, not charged with crimes or placed on trial. On April 13th, there was a brief, violent confrontation. The military said guards raided a communal area to uncover security cameras and windows that had been shrouded for weeks.
COL. JOHN BOGDAN, COMMANDER, Guantanamo Bay Joint Detention Group: We were trying to be patient and work with them, give them the opportunity to comply. We hit the point where, you know, I felt we were accepting too much risk and it was time to take action.
RAY SUAREZ: The guards say the prisoners attacked them with homemade weapons. There were no reported serious injuries, but the prison was put on lockdown, and the number of hunger strikers skyrocketed; 16 are being force-fed, with tubes inserted through the nose and into the stomach. They are typically shackled in chairs like this for the procedure.
An American Naval medical officer described the process in 2009.
MAN: These are the feeding tubes that we use whenever it is determined at a very high level that somebody has reached that point in the hunger striking. Everyone is allowed to hunger strike; that is their right to protest. But if somebody gets to that point where they need additional medical care or it's reached the point where it's threatening their life, that's where the decision is made way above me to step in.
RAY SUAREZ: Among those being force-fed is Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel of Yemen. In a recent New York Times op-ed transmitted to his lawyers through an interpreter, he wrote: "I've been detained at Guantanamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial."
In all, 86 men remain at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release from the facility, 56 without restrictions, another 30 with conditions, all this despite the fact President Obama signed an executive order to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, more than four years ago.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo.
RAY SUAREZ: But Congress has blocked the transfer of any detainees to the mainland U.S. And some, like the Yemeni Moqbel, are men without countries. Their native nations have refused to take them back.
Several high-level al-Qaida detainees, like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are among the few facing military trial at the prison.
SUMMARY: Over half of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay Prison are refusing to eat, protesting the length of their detention, legal limbo and quality of life. Ray Suarez talks with Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald about the origins of the protest and the question of self-determination when it comes to the prisoners' hunger strike.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): They rallied in the rain today across from the White House to protest the ongoing detention of foreign terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Some of the more than 200 protesters wore orange jumpsuits and black hoods to mark 10 years since the first 20 prisoners arrived at Guantanamo. At its peak, the prison housed nearly 700 men. More than 500 were released or transferred to other countries during the Bush administration.
The facility currently holds 171 detainees, with 36 awaiting military tribunals on war crimes charges. Among them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, expected to be arraigned at Guantanamo later this year. The Obama administration had wanted to try him in federal criminal court in New York City, but dropped the idea in the face of strong opposition.
Congress has since barred moving any of the detainees to the U.S. mainland for trial. That, in turn, has effectively prevented any attempt to close the prison once and for all.
In the meantime, there's a renewed focus on the broader question of how to handle terror suspects. A provision in the recently passed national defense authorization bill requires the military to take custody of foreign terror suspects linked to al-Qaida, unless the president specifically rules they should be held by civilian authorities.
It also allows indefinite military detention without the right to trial. But the interpretation of both provisions remains in dispute. The bill was debated in the House of Representatives last month.
REP. ALCEE HASTINGS, D-Fla.: Well, here we are today trying to return to an era of arbitrary justice, witch-hunts and fear-mongering. While this measure includes an exemption for United States citizens, it does not protect them from indefinite detention.
REP. MAC THORNBERRY, R-Texas: The provisions in this bill, Mr. Speaker, are a small step towards having this Congress back involved in making these detention -- detention decisions.
JEFFREY BROWN: White House officials initially warned that President Obama would veto the bill. Congress made modifications, and he ultimately signed it. But he added in a statement: "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists."
The protesters at today's rally in Washington made clear the issue will not go away, and legal challenges to the new law remain possible.
1 a: a license to print or publish (as a book or paper) b: approval of that which is published under the circumstances that censorship of the press exists
VINCENT WARREN, Center for Constitutional Rights: We have in this country confused the war paradigm and the law enforcement paradigm.
And the NDA is the precise example of that. And my colleague is right that the Supreme Court has talked about...
JEFFREY BROWN: You mean it's codifying the war, the war approach?
VINCENT WARREN: It's codifying...
DAVID RIVKIN, former associate White House counsel: As one approach.
VINCENT WARREN: It's codifying the conflation of it, in my view, because the Supreme Court has spoken to that -- the issue in Hamdi.
But in the Padilla case, where you had someone that was captured in the United States and the Bush administration tried to push him into military custody, before the Supreme Court could rule on it, the Bush administration moved him out, because -- frankly, because I thought that they thought that they were going to lose.
So, in fact, the broader discussion really here is about to what extent should law enforcement actions and crimes be treated as crimes in the U.S., and to what extent should crimes of war and violations of the war -- of law of war be treated as military situations...
DAVID RIVKIN: Let's be -- let's be honest.
Do you not accept the notion, as many critics allege, that propels the exclusive use of the civilian justice paradigm? Would you support the trial of somebody, at least high-valued detainees, clearly individuals who are enemy combatants by revamped military commissions that operate in full accordance with the Constitution, with the highest standards of military justice? Or do you think that they're all a bunch of muggers and rapists and bank robbers, so be tried in the district courts?
VINCENT WARREN: No, I would support -- I would support military courts for people who have violated the law of war.
But what I don't support is a conflation of criminal activity and military activity by calling the U.S. a battlefield, and then anybody that is captured on the battlefield of the United States has the option of going to...
----
VINCENT WARREN: The question that really should be asked is, when have we ever seen a war that has no location, no geographical limit, and no time limit? That's the situation that we're in now.
A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.
Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.
The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They list the prisoners’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching guards, tearing apart shower shoes, shouting across cellblocks. And, as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration, they record years of detainees’ comments about one another.
The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.
The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.
The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.
Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.
It's like cleaning up after the elephants in the circus parade -- unpleasant but necessary.
The challenge after the disaster of the Bush presidency will be to regain our once-good international standing, essential precursor for the durable cooperation abroad which, in turn, is essential to blunt and parry terrorism.
To do that, we first will have to repair our national soul.
The Senate Judiciary Committee made a start on that recently when it approved the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act. Habeas corpus is the legal means by which prisoners can challenge their detention in a neutral court and require the government to justify their imprisonment.
That right is the historic and crucial wellspring of civil liberties. Among the worse crudities of Bush and his Republican Congresses has been their claim to an extra-constitutional privilege that somehow licenses them to deny habeas to detainees held as, maybe, terrorists just on Bush's say-so.
As part of his larger scheme to aggrandize the executive branch -- and himself in it Bush has insisted that, if he cries terrorism, he may, as no previous president has, hold captives for whatever real reason he likes, for however long he cares to, wherever he chooses to put them.
The administration has accused the Guantanamo detainees of terrorism -- even though, oops, many have been quietly let go, usually only after years of apparently needless detention. Most Americans have shrugged, but Bush's indifference to plain justice offends our founding principles and the ones which we have lived by since.
The habeas restoration must be adopted, but far more is needed as well.
Congress also should embrace the amendment put into play by Carl Levin, D-Mich., which would secure due process for detainees. Congress last year hurriedly, at administration urging and just in time for the elections, authorized drumhead military commissions to accept testimony forced by torture, deny captives access to the evidence against them and permit hearsay testimony.
BUSH HAS STUBBORNLY REFUSED either to let civil justice take its course or to defer to traditional military courts-martial. He has cut every legal corner, miring prisoners and the national interest alike in one after another jurisprudential mess. Ironically, the Justice Department in the meantime has been successfully trying and imprisoning terrorism suspects the old fashioned way.
Congress has a lot of clean-up ahead of it. It must end such abominations as torture and kidnapping. It must embrace anew the Geneva Conventions. It must bar this and future administrations from farming out prisoners to other nations for second-hand torture.
The obvious problem with starting now is that Bush seems certain to veto any legislation Congress completes. Even so, the process can clarify the imperatives for next year's elections.
Voters need to have the stakes firmly in mind. We will be deciding what kind of country we want ours to be -- an honorable and an effective one, prepared and able to protect itself respectably, as it usually has, or a morally shabby and merely grandstanding one.
"In undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the executive [Bush] is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction," Stevens wrote.
Hegland's article, he writes, "provides powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years." This is part of his summary:
--A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
--Fewer than 20% of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
--Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
--The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 -- including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers.
--And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.
Taylor adds: "The tribunal hearings, based largely on such guilt-by-association logic, have been travesties of unfairness. The detainees are presumed guilty unless they can prove their innocence -- without help from lawyers and without being permitted to know the details and sources of the evidence against them.
Given the administration's track record on accuracy, why does anyone, let alone everyone, in the major media go along with this instead of saying, "Why should we believe these guys know an al-Qaeda operative when they see one?"
