Kangaroo tribunals give a Kafkaesque edge to Guantanamo (HILLARY comments?)

[IChing]

H. Candace Gorman
Sunday, April 15, 2007


The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay -- or Azkaban, as one of my clients, a Harry Potter fan, calls it -- have had no access to a hearing in a court of law. Instead, Guantanamo's inmates are subjected to two kangaroo procedures: Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Boards.

The tribunals determine whether an individual is an enemy combatant. Needless to say, the cards are stacked against the prisoner from the get-go. The tribunals are allowed to rely on hearsay evidence and information acquired though coercion. Any evidence deemed "secret" is withheld from the prisoner. Can you imagine trying to defend yourself against evidence kept secret from you?


Amazingly, my client Abdul Al-Ghizzawi (a Libyan who ran a bakery in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, before being handed to Americans for a bounty in late 2001), was found to have no ties to terrorism and not to be an enemy combatant. Unfortunately, the higher-ups intervened and the tribunal's judgment was overturned six weeks later upon the miraculous discovery of "new evidence." I saw the classified proceedings of my client's tribunals, and I can assure you that no new material was considered. Mark and Joshua Denbeaux, authors of the study "No-Hearing Hearings," have discovered that some prisoners went through as many as three hearings before the tribunals made the "correct" determination that a prisoner had ties to terrorism.>>>>snip

Ali sees parallels between George W. Bush and J.K. Rowling's arch-villain, Voldemort. Guantanamo is the real-world equivalent of Azkaban, the cheerless prison guarded by the soulless Dementors.>>>>>>snip

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/15/ING47P6V8U1.DTL
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THE IRISH TIMES INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY CLINTON

But would you close Guantanamo?

"I'm not going to speculate on that now. I think that's the kind of tactical decision that has to be considered depending on what the real facts are at the time. "

http://www.ireland.com/focus/2007/clinton/index.html

[youngdem]

1. Wow, Hillary can't even bring herself to say she wants Gitmo closed?

:puke:

[pscot]

2. Very disheartening

I don't know if I can vote for someone who will not disavow Gotmo and all it stands for.

[youngdem]

3. I mean shit, it wouldn't surprise me if the Repuke candidate wanted to close it. It should be easy

for her to say it should be closed.

Very sad that this woman (who is effectively pro-war and who can't say she wants Gitmo closed) is our front-runner.

We need moral leadership from the Dem nominee.

[Matilda]

4. I have to ask: what is the point?

They - the dimwits in the Pentagon and the White House - must know that after five years and various
tribunals finding that a particular person is not proven to be an enemy combatant, that there is
about a 99.9% chance that the person in question doesn't pose any threat to the safety of Americans
or anyone else. So why are they driven to keep coming back until they can find a tame tribunal to
vote the person guilty? It looks very much as though they do it simply to avoid admitting that they
just might have made a mistake, might have gone overboard in their enthusiasm to catch terrorists,
might have set people up by promising dirt-poor people a bounty for anyone handed over.

I can't think of any reason for their conduct other than sheer bloody-mindedness, and every clear-
thinking Senator and Congressperson should be demanding that Gitmo be closed right now, because what
they are doing is no different to the French Revolutionary Tribunals, the Nazi concentration camps,
or the Soviet Gulags.

The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves.

[CGowen]

5. You need it to keep the illusion of real terrorists as basis for your fake 100 year" war on terror"

It's not only Gitmo, where innocent goat herders or taxi drivers from Afghanistan are held.

Benamar Benatta is one of the other victims of 9/11.

..........

Because sometime on Sept. 12, 2001, someone in authority in Canada apparently decided to circumvent this country's immigration laws and return Benatta – illegally and against his will, it seems – to the U.S.

Which is where, as he detailed yesterday in an interview, his nightmare really took shape.

He was jailed for almost five years without charge. He was manacled and chained. For the first month and a half, he was not allowed to wear shoes. He was denied access to counsel. He was kept in a cell with the light on 24 hours a day and wakened every half hour. He was beaten. If he complained that his chains were too tight, the guards tightened them further.

The aviation engineer and former Algerian air force lieutenant isn't a terrorist. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation determined that well over five years ago. Nor has he ever been convicted of any offence.

Indeed, for most of the time he was kept in jail – first in Brooklyn, later in upstate New York – he wasn't charged with any crime. When he eventually appeared in U.S. court on the minor immigration charge of overstaying his visa, an angry judge dismissed the case as a "sham."




.........

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/201758

[Demeter]

6. Hillary's Never Going to be Able To Dig Her Way Out

of that moral abyss she's standing in--she should stop digging and pray for a dust storm, or a truckload of fill.