Whatever Obama and his officials might try to say and do, unless they takes positive action to "do" something about Gitmo, it will remain a blot and blight on America and its so-called Rule of Law and justice system. Of course, it doesn't help that many of the prison's inmates are Muslims - with no prospect of being released even though they haven't been through any judicial system.
"The Wiki Guantanamo files are as fascinating as they are dismaying, but their principal contribution does not lie in exposing how the Bush administration debased American moral, political, and constitutional values. There has been an abundance of that over the years. Their significance lies in their pulling back the curtain on how stupidly, haphazardly, arbitrarily, incompetently, and how contemptuously of detainees it was all done. The national security warriors couldn’t even keep the paperwork in order.
The Wiki files display the incredibly tangled ethical, legal, and administrative morass created by the Bush administration at Guantanamo. It took more than a year for Obama’s Attorney General to review the key case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed “mastermind” of the September 11 attack, and to decide that the Department of Justice would be able to win a conviction without using evidence obtained through months of waterboarding and other tortures. So the Attorney General ordered the transfer of the prosecution from the jurisdiction of a military commission at Guantanmo to the federal district court in Manhattan where Mohammed would be tried by the same rules as anybody charged with a crime by the government.
Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court was a welcome departure from the Obama administration’s failure to fulfill its pledge to rectify the ethical and constitutional transgressions of the Bush administration. The administration has backed off from prosecuting torturers and CIA officials who destroyed evidence of torture; the prison at Guantanamo will not be closed in the foreseeable future; the government will continue to try detainees in military courts. Trying Mohammed in federal court would open the trial to global scrutiny and would display the government’s re-commitment to the rule of law in its response to Islamist radicalism and terrorism.
Last month Eric Holder reversed himself. He capitulated to the demagoguery and fear mongering of militaristic Islamophobes and ordered the trial back to a military tribunal in Guantanamo. Opponents of the commissions are understandably dismayed by his retreat. As a practical matter, they regard the commissions as unworkable. No serious prosecution has yet been brought to completion. But the paramount criticism of the tribunals is that they are irredeemably defective. The organization and procedures of the tribunal fall unacceptably short of the constitutional norms that prevail in civilian courts. So in the court of world opinion, conviction by a military commission would worsen the moral blemish of Guantanamo. Justice will not be seen to be done, and in many cases justice won’t in fact be done. The Wiki files make it abundantly clear that fairness and common sense were not among the prevailing values at Guantanamo."
Continue reading this piece, on CounterPunch, here.
Also read this piece on AlJazeera in relation to the latest alleged "suicide" at Gitmo.
"The Wiki Guantanamo files are as fascinating as they are dismaying, but their principal contribution does not lie in exposing how the Bush administration debased American moral, political, and constitutional values. There has been an abundance of that over the years. Their significance lies in their pulling back the curtain on how stupidly, haphazardly, arbitrarily, incompetently, and how contemptuously of detainees it was all done. The national security warriors couldn’t even keep the paperwork in order.
The Wiki files display the incredibly tangled ethical, legal, and administrative morass created by the Bush administration at Guantanamo. It took more than a year for Obama’s Attorney General to review the key case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed “mastermind” of the September 11 attack, and to decide that the Department of Justice would be able to win a conviction without using evidence obtained through months of waterboarding and other tortures. So the Attorney General ordered the transfer of the prosecution from the jurisdiction of a military commission at Guantanmo to the federal district court in Manhattan where Mohammed would be tried by the same rules as anybody charged with a crime by the government.
Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court was a welcome departure from the Obama administration’s failure to fulfill its pledge to rectify the ethical and constitutional transgressions of the Bush administration. The administration has backed off from prosecuting torturers and CIA officials who destroyed evidence of torture; the prison at Guantanamo will not be closed in the foreseeable future; the government will continue to try detainees in military courts. Trying Mohammed in federal court would open the trial to global scrutiny and would display the government’s re-commitment to the rule of law in its response to Islamist radicalism and terrorism.
Last month Eric Holder reversed himself. He capitulated to the demagoguery and fear mongering of militaristic Islamophobes and ordered the trial back to a military tribunal in Guantanamo. Opponents of the commissions are understandably dismayed by his retreat. As a practical matter, they regard the commissions as unworkable. No serious prosecution has yet been brought to completion. But the paramount criticism of the tribunals is that they are irredeemably defective. The organization and procedures of the tribunal fall unacceptably short of the constitutional norms that prevail in civilian courts. So in the court of world opinion, conviction by a military commission would worsen the moral blemish of Guantanamo. Justice will not be seen to be done, and in many cases justice won’t in fact be done. The Wiki files make it abundantly clear that fairness and common sense were not among the prevailing values at Guantanamo."
Continue reading this piece, on CounterPunch, here.
Also read this piece on AlJazeera in relation to the latest alleged "suicide" at Gitmo.
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