SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

wait! I thought the American POW's weren't tortured.

Stop!

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by classicman

Oh BS - so we round up a bunch of nobodies and torture them because we are afraid? Sorry, I think not. There had to be some reason - probably not a good one, if there is one, but still...

We weren't the only ones doing the rounding up.

When you offer a reward or considerations for the capture of "terrorists" a lot of people get turned into terrorists overnight.

Neighbor down the street, the one with the loud goats? Yeah, he's a terrorist, damn those goats of his...

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by flaja

You have been shown time and time again that legal due process rights are and have been extended to non-citizens that are subject to U.S. law.

The flaw in the argument here is that POW non-citizens (these being de facto if not altogether de jure POWs) aren't reckoned by anyone anywhere as being actually subject to their captor nations' laws.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's true, and the reason POWs treatment was addressed by the Geneva Convention. The wrinkle is Bush saying these are not POWs but a new class, called "illegal combatants". Being non-POWs, that makes this new class civilian criminals and subject to the laws of the "host" nation.

[DanaC]

Would have been a damn sight easier to just adhere to the Geneva Convention and accept them as POWs.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Would have been a damn sight easier to just adhere to the Geneva Convention and accept them as POWs.

Just send them all back to their "home countries."

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

Just send them all back to their "home countries."

second.

[Troubleshooter]

Just send them all back to their "home countries."

Truth and the Gitmo Detainees

Is every prisoner at Guantanamo really a terrorist?

Steve Chapman | July 7, 2008

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

The case involved Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Muslim who fled to Afghanistan in May 2001 to escape persecution of his Uighur ethnic group by the Beijing government. When the U.S. invaded after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Uighur camp where he lived was destroyed by air strikes. He and his compatriots made their way to Pakistan, where villagers handed them over to the government, which transferred them to American custody.

You might think you would have to do something pretty obvious to wind up in Guantanamo. Apparently not. The U.S. government does not claim Parhat was a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. He was not captured on a battlefield. The government's own military commission admitted it found no evidence that he "committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition partners."

So why did the Pentagon insist on holding him as an enemy combatant? Because he was affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a separatist Muslim group fighting for independence from Beijing. It had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks but reputedly got help from al-Qaida.

But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after reviewing secret documents submitted by the government, found that there was no real evidence. It said the flimsy case mounted against Parhat "comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true." And it ruled that, based on the information available, he was not an enemy combatant even under the Pentagon's own definition of the term.

Is this verdict just another act of judicial activism by arrogant liberals on the bench? Not by a long shot.

Of the three judges who signed the opinion, one, Thomas Griffith, was appointed in 2005 by President Bush himself. Another, David Sentelle, was nominated in 1985 by President Reagan—and had earlier joined in ruling that the Guantanamo detainees could not go to federal court to assert their innocence (a decision the Supreme Court overturned).

The administration could hardly have asked for a more accommodating group of judges. Yet they found in favor of the detainee on the simple grounds that if the government is going to imprison someone as an enemy combatant, it needs some evidence that he is one.

Parhat may not be an exceptional case. Most of the prisoners were not captured by the U.S. in combat but were turned over by local forces, often in exchange for a bounty. We had to take someone else's word that they were bad guys.

A 2006 report by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux found that only 8 percent of those held at Guantanamo were al-Qaida fighters. Even a study done at West Point concluded that just 73 percent of the detainees were a "demonstrated threat"—which means 27 percent were not.

The Parhat case doesn't prove that everyone in detention at Guantanamo is an innocent victim of some misunderstanding. But it does show the dangers of trusting the administration—any administration—to act as judge, jury, and jailer. It illustrates the need for an independent review to make sure there is some reason to believe the people being treated as terrorists really deserve it.

If any particular detainees are as bad as the administration claims, it should have no trouble making that case in court. But there is nothing to be gained from the indefinite imprisonment of someone whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Keeping innocent people behind bars is a tragedy for them and a waste for us.

[TheMercenary]

Send them home.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

snip~ Parhat may not be an exceptional case. Most of the prisoners were not captured by the U.S. in combat but were turned over by local forces, often in exchange for a bounty. We had to take someone else's word that they were bad guys. ~snip

Because Bush&Co decided that the Afghanistan war against the Taliban would be carried out by local warlords, with US support, the warlords' forces did most of the capturing Taliban/illegal combatants.
Now I know not all the detainees came that way, but that would explain why the majority were not captured by US soldiers.

[tw]

Originally Posted by DanaC

If they're a bad guy, then there should be evidence to prove it. If there isn't evidence to prove it then you can't say they're a bad guy. If you can prove it then you have no reason not to allow them a proper defence. If by allowing them a proper defence the evidence fails.....then so be it.

Hundreds were held in Guantanamo while innocent and without due process because wacko extremists needed bogeymen to lie and remain popular. Hundreds have already been released to their home nations because, after being tortured and held for years in violation of laws, suddenly they are guilty of nothing.

Today another five have had charges dropped because (from the NY Times of 21 Oct 2008)

U.S. Drops Charges for 5 Guantánamo Detainees
All five of the cases had been handled by a prosecutor who stepped down in September, saying there were systemic problems with the fairness of the military prosecutions there. ...

The dismissal was a retreat by the government facing an aggressive defense in the case.

It came in the same week that administration lawyers changed course in another highly publicized terrorism case, abandoning efforts to prove that six other Guantánamo detainees took part in a 2001 plan to bomb the United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Long time Cellar dwellers can confirm, I have never been so critical of any politician ... ever. But we never had a president so obviously corrupt. We have never had a president who lies so much. We have never had a president so stupid as to almost get us in a hot war with China over a silly spy plane. Who was calling that ignorant back when George Jr almost got us into war?

We are now starting to suffer the economic consequences of a mental midget president supported by people who must be told how to think daily by Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, and Pat Robertson. (Europeans just cannot appreciate how widespread the propaganda that tells Urbane Guerrilla types what to know. Europeans were lesser people who could even be kidnapped at any time if the US felt threatened.)

Guantanamo is the perfect example of what anti-patriots have done to America.

Five more completely innocent people released because America has too many who are so wacko extremist.

The best known of the five men whose charges were dismissed Tuesday is Binyam Mohamed, ... accused in the “dirty bomb” case. He has claimed he was tortured while in American custody or in countries to which he said the United States sent him. His lawyers argued Tuesday that the government was trying to avoid having to answer his accusations.

How many were patriotic enough to see Saddam did not have WMDs? No other politician has ever earned or received from me so much criticism - including their routine use of torture. Why are Americans so sheepish as to not demand the impeachment of this nation's worst president ever? Because to many Americans even still approve of torture ... and who also call for the murder of Obama. I have even heard it discussed in low voices. Wacko extremism in its many condoned forms (hate, racism, demagoguery) is alive and well and far more embedded in America that most Europeans would realize.

We held and tortured some 800 innocent people for years. And then say, “Sorry about that.” When do we Get Smart?

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by tw

after being tortured

cite.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

cite.

First, define torture. This administration has had a more difficult time defining torture than Bill Clinton did defining 'sex'. It would be humorous if the stakes weren't so high. A simple definition of 'torture' is 'treatment you would not want inflicted on your soldiers if they were captured'.

By this definition, stress positions, sleep deprivation, fake executions, and waterboarding are all 'torture'.

In 2004, the Justice Department attempted to set as the legal policy of the US an incredibly narrow definition of torture.

In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last "months or even years."

Of course the Justice Department, unlike the Army, had the luxury of knowing that their personnel would never be in a situation where that definition could be used against them.

Since it's inception, the US has maintained the legal fiction that the detention facility at Guantanamo is some legal Limbo. The laws of the US do not apply, because it is in Cuba but is not an embassy. The laws of Cuba do not apply, because it is under US control via the disputed Cuban-American Treaty of 1903. So the US has basically created a legal space in the cracks between the laws of two sovereign nations and dropped the detainees into it.

The Supreme Court at first went along with this to a degree, sort of like the lifeguards at a pool allowing a certain amount of roughhousing in the water. At some point, matters became so severe that the court intervened to apply some legal boundary before the water got bloody.

While nowhere near as brutal as the "Hanoi Hilton", there is not a lot of doubt that even "Class B" torture like sleep deprivation over a period of years would render any confession inadmissible in a normal American court, or even a military court trying members of its own service.

The challenge is that even if any of these defendants are found guilty, the moment that they are shipped back to their own countries or the United States for imprisonment, they will reenter the normal world and be able to appeal their convictions. Fortunately for the US, some of these countries are not democratic but are allies of the US, so they might be safely transported to another legal black hole which will prevent their physical and legal treatment from being examined in detail.

[Undertoad]

I asked for a cite that torture occurred at Guantanamo. You quoted my request and then wrote a long post that does not contain a cite.

[dar512]

wiki

Then search for the word torture.