Guantánamo: Still Waiting to Hear That Things Have Actually Changed

TimK — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:00:00 -0800

While the Obama-administration DOJ’s right hand is investigating whether Bush torture-memo authors should be disciplined, its left hand is still upholding the very same torture policies.

The impression I get is what I expected to see: even though the administration has changed, the government is still being filled with the same paranoid babble that characterized the Bush administration, and the doofuses are afraid to dismiss it too quickly. Or rather, in a word: politics.

A federal appeals court ordered the continued imprisonment of 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs, who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay, despite the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers them “enemy combatants” and even admitted that it does not have the authority to detain them.
The government is still wrestling with the case of Ali al-Marri, a U.S. citizen who has been detained indefinitely without trial.
The Pentagon concluded that “the Guantánamo Bay prison complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva conventions.” (They must be looking at a different version than the one I’m familiar with, which specifically disallows “violence to life and person, in particular… cruel treatment and torture; … outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”)
Obama’s new DOJ continue to regurgitate the Bush-era claims of “state secrets” in the Jeppesen case of 5 men who were kidnapped and tortured by the CIA.
And the DOJ is still trying to gum up the ACLU’s effort to help Mohammed Jawad, a Guantánamo prisoner who has been unlawfully held by U.S. government since he was a teenager. (See also this post on Mohammed Jawad’s case.)

Yes, President Obama ordered that military commission proceedings be stopped, but the government is still pursuing a last-minute effort by the Bush administration to deny Jawad his right to challenge his imprisonment in a court of law.

“Mr. Jawad’s case is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the military commissions, because his detention and prosecution were based on a confession that was tortured out of him. For the government to try to use the unconstitutional commissions as an excuse for delaying federal court habeas review of Mr. Jawad’s case makes no sense,” said Hina Shamsi, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “President Obama followed through on his campaign promise to halt the military commissions, and Attorney General Holder has said the commissions do not provide due process protections, but the Justice Department still seems to be playing catch-up. The new administration should do the right thing and reject Bush administration policies that sought to evade independent judicial oversight of Mr. Jawad’s unlawful detention.”

Jawad’s former military commission prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, submitted a 14-page statement in support of the ACLU’s challenge, stating that the flaws in the commission system make it impossible “to harbor the remotest hope that justice is an achievable goal.” Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s statement describes other torture Jawad suffered in U.S. custody. The Bush administration previously told the judge in Jawad’s military commission case that the centerpiece of its case against him was evidence the judge had suppressed because it was obtained through torture.

After President Obama assumed office, he instructed the Secretary of Defense to seek a halt to all commission proceedings, including Jawad’s. But the Court of Military Commission Review allowed the farce to continue, partially because Mr. Jawad’s habeas case could still proceed in federal court.

(Yes, that’s right. They’re fighting to deny him habeas corpus, and they also are continuing to persecute him, based on the supposition that he has a right to habeas corpus. I’m sure this makes sense at some level. But a word of advice: Don’t try to actually understand contorted government logic. Just accept that they’re brainfucked, and move on.)

“After unjustly detaining and abusing Mr. Jawad for over six years, the government’s effort to prosecute Mr. Jawad in the commissions has been an abject failure. All Mr. Jawad is asking is to have his day in court so he can prove his innocence,” said U.S. Air Force Major David J. R. Frakt, who represents Jawad in the military commissions case and is co-counsel in the habeas case. “The government’s continued stonewalling, particularly when both President Obama and the Chief Judge of the Military Commission Court of Review has recognized his right to habeas review, is inexcusable. A prompt habeas hearing is especially necessary because Mr. Jawad’s mental and physical well-being continue to be jeopardized by the harsh conditions in which he is being held at Guantánamo. The government seems to have lost sight of a fundamental truth – justice delayed is justice denied.”

Always watching!
-TimK

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Guantánamo: Still Waiting to Hear That Things Have Actually Changed