The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

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.  read more »

Chris Anders of the ACLU, reporting on the Guantánamo hearings of Ibrahim al-Qosi and Mohammad Hashim a couple weeks ago, noted that there is death in the air there… the death of Guantánamo itself:

[E]veryone notices that attendance is way down. A couple of military personnel shut off the power in empty tents here in “Camp Justice.” As the only representative of a human rights group this week, my bed is the only one occupied in my six-bed tent. And the media pool is now down to just one reporter. It seems that all that is left to be done is for the new president to pull the plug on the whole operation on January 20.

“But,” explained Suzanne Ito in another post, “we’re not tossing out the orange ribbons just yet. Our work is not done. We need to keep up the momentum on this issue, and show President-elect Obama that he has our support to shut Guantánamo down on Day One. With an executive order, he can close Gitmo and shutter the military commissions system.”

Then CNN reported that a federal judge ordered that 5 prisoners at Guantánamo be released, because they were not “enemy combatants,” or at least the government could not demonstrate that they were.

The smell of death in the air, and this day, it’s a sweet, refreshing aroma.

-TimK

Another good one from the ACLU. And having just read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, this report reminds me that I’m not the only modern novelist basing his fiction on real life.

(Compare Abe’s Turn Episode 2.)

-TimK  read more »