Close Git-mo

Closing Guantánamo Bay is a simple matter of will.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

In fact, as the Center for Constitutional Rights has laid out in a clear and concise report, closing Guantánamo is easy. There are three simple and necessary steps to close Guantánamo:

1. send those who can go home home,
2. secure safe haven for those who cannot, and
3. charge those who can be charged then try them in ordinary federal criminal court.

More Worst of Worst Going Free

Update: See McClatchy's Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series for a close look at administration lawlessness, and its utter inhumanity toward the innocent.

From the Times, Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantanamo:

In the first hearing on the government's justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

Bush and Cheney had called these innocents the worst of the worst, who are so evil and dangerous that we just had to throw out habeas corpus.

The Bush administration feared the consequences of innocents asking for a look at the evidence in federal court.

As human rights attorney, Scott Horton, writes: "... (T)he Bush Administration’s claims about the prisoners were revealed to be a sham not backed by serious evidence. The Bush Administration’s incarceration of five of the six petitioners was pronounced an unlawful, and indeed possibly criminal act."

Par for the course for this administration that is the single worst enemy to the cause of freedom in modern American history.

Obama has promised to close the camp, the beginning of a reversal of the Bush administration's horrid record on human rights and individual liberty.

U.S. Torture Truth Commission Needed

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof calls for the establishment of a Truth Commission to document and investigate the human rights violations of the United States government under the Bush administration.

Kristof writes:

The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing. ... Both Barack Obama and John McCain should commit to impaneling a Truth Commission early in the next administration. This commission would issue a report to help us absorb the lessons of our failings, the better to avoid them during the next crisis.

Good idea on not prosecuting the perpetrators, as any rational accounting could sensibly hold most of us reading these words accountable. And that's not so realistic.

So, let's establish the Truth Commission and take the folks directly responsible for conceiving and carrying out the despicable American torture program: George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, David Addington, the whole stinking lot of them; subpoena the bastards, grant total immunity save the vow to prosecute any lie or half-truth left out under testimony.

As for Kristof's suggestion that we stack the proposed commission with military personnel--forget that, let's stack the commission with human rights activists, investigators, and journalists who have a demonstrated history of reporting on human rights violations.

Allan Nairn, human rights activist and journalist, would be the model.

Some resources on human rights:

- United States Constitution
- Fourth Geneva Convention (full text)
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Physicians for Human Rights Report on American Torture

Lies Catching Up to Bush Administration

Famed journalist I.F. Stone warned "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

Like in many other aspects of government, the Bush administration has veered to the extreme in its mendacity.

Guantánamo Bay holds only the worst of the worst, the administration repeatedly assured the American public after preventing examination of the evidence holding the accused.

Turns out the administration (as McClatchy news demonstrated in its America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men in mid-June) is the worst of the worst in its commitment to bald-faced lying.

Today's Post and Times report on the duplicity of the administration that contends in legal arguments that because the Chinese government said so and the assertions were repeated several times by American officials, accused terrorist, Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim who fled a persecuting Chinese government, must be a terrorist.

The argument was ridiculed and dismissed by a conservative, unanimous appellate panel:

From the Times:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” ...

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See the opinion at Huzaifa Parhat v. Robert M. Gates et al (No 06-1307).

American Concern for Human Rights Waning

McClatchy's America's prison for terrorists often held innocent men piece yesterday ought to have produced screaming headlines and constant chatter about the crimes that the Bush administration had committed at Guantanamo.

The findings by the comprehensive, unprecedented McClatchy interviews "...conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization" and US officials talking on background produced nothing of the kind, telling us much about the politcal culture.

In sum, the administration tortured innocents who they knew to be innocent, devised a legal framework to shield the US government from being held accountable, and broke the international laws on human rights self-consciously and shamelessly.

Among the findings:

- A series of White House directives placed 'suspected enemy combatants' beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

- In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

- Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

- Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the 'War Council' devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected 'enemy combatants' indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

- The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

- With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

Today a Washington Post piece, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts,
Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On, contains similar revelations.

Nuremberg and Guantánamo Bay

“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
— Justice Robert H. Jackson's Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, November 21, 1945, at Nuremberg, Germany in Case No. 1: The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al.

This summer, the world will see how profoundly the United States has fallen when the administration's military tribunal-'kangaroo court' spectacle tries six 9/11 mass murderers using confession-obtained-by-torture evidence, secret evidence, and severely diminished due process in a judicial pretence so appalling that the Pentagon's own chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, and two other prosecutors resigned in protest, as the administration has arranged for a rigged political show trial at which the world will be dismayed.