GITMO: Joke From The Beginning
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Law, The War On TerrorismNot that this is a surprise, but when I hear guys like Romney fire up the pro-war, pro-torture, anti-habeas corpus crowd, I really wonder if he even knows what he means by saying we need to expand Guantanamo Bay.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — An Army officer who played a key role in the “enemy combatant” hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence.His affidavit, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.
Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.
Despite repeated requests, intelligence agencies arbitrarily refused to provide specific information that could have helped either side in the tribunals, said Abraham, who said he served as a main liaison between the Combat Status Review Tribunals and the intelligence agencies.
“What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” Abraham said in the affidavit submitted on behalf of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, who is challenging his classification as an “enemy combatant.”
Abraham’s affidavit “proves what we all suspected, which is that the CSRTs were a complete sham,” said a lawyer for al-Odah, David Cynamon.
So then, we can stop this unconstitutional nonsense, or, as Romney suggests, expand these abuses and continue to look like terrified buffoons who will ignore our freedoms without thinking twice about it.
Pssst…pick the first choice…
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 and is filed under Law, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I still think the best part of the joke was when the US government made the argument that US law (specifically on habeas corpus, as I recall) did not apply there . . . because Guantanamo was not US territory, but merely leased from Cuba. I kept waiting for someone to apply to the Cuban courts for relief. Not because I expected our government to pay any attention, but just to demonstrate the stupidity of the argument.