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Blunderov
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Guantanemo Show Trials : "We can't have acquittals".
« on: 2008-02-28 02:25:30 » |
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[Blunderov]
http://www.alternet.org/rights/77360/
Gitmo Trials Rigged from the Start
By Ross Tuttle, The Nation. Posted February 21, 2008.
Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes -- and seeking the death penalty for all of them.
As the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
Colonel Davis's criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed "sexy" and of "high-interest" (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. "I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively."
Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions' bias -- a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration's conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else.
When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes -- the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.
"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"
Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."
(Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, "The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.")
"That he said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process," says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes's conflicts with the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration's views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration's advocacy of "extreme interrogation techniques."
"The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job," says Horton. "His clashes have always had the same subtext -- they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work."
Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes's role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.
Currently, in his capacity as Pentagon general counsel, Haynes oversees both the prosecution and the defense for the commissions. "You would think a person in that position wouldn't be favoring one side," says Colonel Davis.
Told of Davis's story about Haynes, Clive Stafford Smith, a defense attorney who has represented more than seventy Guantánamo clients, said, "Hearing it makes me think I'm back in Mississippi representing a black man in front of an all-white jury."
He adds, "It confirms what people close to the system have always said," noting that when three prosecutors -- Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf -- requested to be transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions in 2004, they claimed they'd been told the process was rigged. In an e-mail to his supervisors, Preston had said that there was thin evidence against the accused. "But they were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn't need evidence to get convictions," says Stafford Smith.
At the time, the military wrote it off as "miscommunication" and "personality conflicts." And then there were changes in personnel. "They told us that the system had been cleaned up … but I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same," says Stafford Smith.
The terrible irony is that even if acquittals were possible, the government has declared that it can continue to detain anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" for the duration of hostilities--no matter the outcome of a trial. And most of the 275 men held at Guantánamo are classified as "enemy combatants" while the hostilities in the "war on terror" could be never-ending.
Says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner, "The trial doesn't make a difference. They can hold you there forever until they decide to let you out." The one person to be released from Guantánamo through the judicial process, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty. As Wizner wrote in the Los Angeles Times in April 2007, "In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantánamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released."
Still, the trials serve a purpose for the government, in providing the semblance of a legitimate judicial process. According to defense attorneys involved -- and many of the former prosecutors, like Davis -- the process is political, not legal.
"If someone was acquitted, then it would suggest we did the wrong thing in the first place. That can't happen," says Horton sardonically. "When the government decides to clear someone, it calls the person 'no-longer an enemy combatant' instead of just saying they made a mistake."
He adds, "For people like Haynes, justice is meant to serve the party."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/worthington.php?articleid=12428
February 28, 2008
Guantánamo's Shambolic Trials
Pentagon boss resigns, ex-chief prosecutor joins defense
by Andy Worthington
This has been another terrible week for Guantánamo's Military Commissions, established by Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001 to try, convict and execute those responsible for 9/11 through a novel process so far removed from the US court system and the military's own judicial procedures that the tainted fruit of torture would be allowed, and secret evidence could be withheld from the accused.
Struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, the Commissions stumbled back to life later that year in the hastily passed and virtually unscrutinized Military Commissions Act (which, for good measure, stripped the Guantánamo detainees of the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court in 2004), but they have struggled to establish any kind of credibility.
Now apparently shorn of evidence obtained through torture (although evidence obtained through "coercion" can be allowed at the discretion of the government-appointed military judges), the Commissions were supposed to spring back to muscular life two weeks ago, when the administration finally got around to charging six men in connection with the 9/11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed that he was "responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z."
However, although the charges finally brought 9/11 back into the spotlight, the issue of torture – and the administration's increasingly desperate attempts to hide the evidence of its own "extreme, deliberate and unusually cruel" practices – has clung, limpet-like, to the stories of these men, and does not look like being resolved any time soon, especially as the process of finding them military defense lawyers will, like everything else to do with the Commission's stuttering five-year history, likely proceed at a glacial pace.
In the meantime, the cases that have actually made it before the Commissions remain mired in controversy. The administration's decision to choose a child soldier – the Canadian Omar Khadr – as its first attempt at a real conviction (after the Australian David Hicks flew home last March following a politically-motivated plea bargain) continues to attract heated opposition.
This week, for example, the leaders of bar associations in 34 countries – including Australia, France, Finland, Iraq, Ireland, Romania, South Africa, Turkey and the UK – sent a letter to George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling for the closure of Guantánamo, and specifically addressing Omar Khadr's case.
"For five years, Omar Khadr, a ‘child' under the terms of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, has languished without trial in Guantánamo," the lawyers wrote, adding, "There is reason to believe he has been subjected to treatment that is at best degrading and abusive and at worst amounts to torture … Few governmental operations by democratic countries have shown such a profound disrespect for the rule of law. Guantánamo Bay has come to signify injustice for some at the hands of the powerful." The lawyers urged that Khadr be "transferred to the custody of Canadian law enforcement officials, so that he can face due process under Canadian law and the principles of the rule of law," adding, "We do not deny that some of those detained at Guantánamo may have committed criminal acts. If so, they should be tried by a properly constituted court operating under rules that guarantee a fair trial."
Developments in the other case before the Commissions – that of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one of Osama bin Laden's drivers – are even more distressing for the administration, as a surprising new witness has offered to step forward in his defense. Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions, was once a fierce advocate for the system, arguing, as recently as last June, that those who criticized Guantánamo and the Commissions failed to understand that, as he described it, "Reality for Guantánamo Bay is the daily professionalism of its staff, the humanity of its detention centers and the fair and transparent nature of the military commissions charged with trying war criminals."
Less than four months later, Col. Davis' opinions had changed dramatically. In September he "filed a formal complaint," alleging that Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to retired judge Susan Crawford, the "convening authority" overseeing the trials, had "overstepped his mandate by interfering directly in cases." He suggested that both he and Hartmann should resign "for the good of the process," adding, "If he believes in military commissions as strongly as I do, then let's do the right thing and both of us walk away before we do more harm."
The roots of Col. Davis' discontent clearly predated his enthusiastic endorsement of the Commissions in June, and were focused not only on Brig. Gen. Hartmann, who was appointed to his role in July, but also on Susan Crawford, who was appointed in February as the Commission's "convening authority" by defense secretary Robert Gates, and on Crawford's immediate boss William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's General Counsel.
Col. Davis was reportedly upset because Brig. Gen. Hartmann had been insisting that Salim Hamdan should be offered a plea bargain similar to the one that saw David Hicks released, even though prosecutors explained that it "would be a blow to the government's credibility." One unnamed prosecutor even went so far as to complain, "Think of our only other ‘success' in this – David Hicks. How is that a success for the United States government? How does that justify Guantánamo?"
Brig. Gen. Hartmann was also clearly opposed to what he perceived as the weakness of the cases that Col. Davis had chosen to pursue: those which, like Hicks, Hamdan and Omar Khadr, relied "largely on unclassified evidence," allowing trials to be open to the press to address criticism that the process was "too secretive," even though these cases tended to involve "relatively undramatic charges, such as providing services to a terrorist organization." Hartmann, in contrast, wanted higher profile cases, which "could attract more public attention and perhaps also support for the tribunal system, even though they may involve closed proceedings."
In addition, Col. Davis' dissatisfaction with Susan Crawford clearly predated Brig. Gen. Hartmann's arrival at the Military Commissions. As was revealed in October, David Hicks' plea bargain was the result of an arrangement between Dick Cheney and Australian Premier John Howard, who had ignored Hicks for years, but was now suffering in an election year as Hicks' plight gained ever more support among potential voters. After Cheney flew out to arrange the deal, it was Susan Crawford who pushed through the plea bargain at Guantánamo, working directly with Hicks' defense lawyers and cutting Col. Davis out of the loop.
Col. Davis resigned on October 4, but it was not until December, when he wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, that his even more strenuous objections to the role of William J. Haynes II were revealed. With two months to refine his anger, Col. Davis refused to pull any punches. "I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote, adding, "I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly."
After pointing out that it was "absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality," Col. Davis explained that "the political appointee known as the ‘convening authority' – a title with no counterpart in civilian courts – was not living up to that obligation." As he described it, Susan Crawford had overstepped her administrative role, and "had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution's pretrial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases." "Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles," he continued, "perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused."
After also criticizing Susan Crawford and Brig. Gen. Hartmann for their desire to conduct trials "behind closed doors," because "Transparency is critical" and "even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with skepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors," Col. Davis directed his ire at William J. Haynes II. Noting that he resigned "a few hours after" being informed that he had been placed in a chain of command under Haynes, he mentioned that "Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture," and pointed out, "I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 [shortly after taking the job] that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned."
Col. Davis was not the first prominent official to refuse to be implicated in the use of torture by US forces, of course, but while Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey was busy equivocating horribly on waterboarding, skirting the issue in October, when he told a Senate Judiciary Committee, "if [waterboarding] amounts to torture, it is not constitutional," Col. Davis' attack on Haynes placed him, without a shadow of a doubt, in the anti-torture camp.
His focus on Haynes was also unerring. Appointed as the Pentagon's Chief Counsel in May 2001, Haynes was a protégé of David Addington, Dick Cheney's closest advisor and, arguably, the chief architect of the administration's post-9/11 flight from the law, and as Senator Edward Kennedy explained in a Washington Post op-ed in 2004, he "developed and defended three of the administration's most controversial policies: the refusal to treat any of the hundreds of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions of 1949; the department's military tribunal plan for trying suspected war criminals; and even the incarceration of US citizens without counsel or judicial review."
Not only involved in the development of the concept of holding prisoners as "enemy combatants" without charge or trial, and without the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and of playing a part in the process that led to holding a US citizen, Jose Padilla, as an "enemy combatant" on the US mainland, Haynes was also deeply involved in the approval of "enhanced interrogation techniques" for use at Guantánamo and beyond in 2002 and 2003.
In November 2002, Haynes advised Donald Rumsfeld to approve the use of techniques that included prolonged solitary confinement, 20-hour interrogations, and the use of painful stress positions, and liaised between Rumsfeld and Alberto J. Mora, the head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, in January 2003, when Mora – a principled opponent of torture, like Col. Davis – threatened to expose the administration's use of the techniques. Bowing to the pressure, Rumsfeld withdrew his authorization, but once Mora was placated Haynes oversaw a working group led by lawyer John Yoo and Air Force general counsel Mary Walker, which effectively reintroduced "enhanced interrogation techniques" on the sly, creatively bypassing international treaties banning the use of torture, and invoking the President's "wartime" authority to act without any oversight whatsoever.
Last week, in the wake of the announcement that six "high-value" detainees were to be charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, Col. Davis resumed his attack on the Commission process, and on William Haynes in particular. When asked by the Nation if he thought that the six men could receive a fair trial, he related a conversation with Haynes that had taken place in August 2005. According to Col. Davis, Haynes "said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time" – a reference to the 1945 trials of Nazi leaders, "considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes," as the article described them. Col. Davis replied that he had noted that there had been some acquittals at Nuremberg, which had "lent great credibility to the proceedings."
"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Col. Davis remembered. "At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"
Having thoroughly exposed the preconceived notion of guilt in the Commissions, which infects the whole of the administration's post-9/11 detention policies (in the tribunals at Guantánamo, for example, condemned by former insiders for being designed to rubberstamp the detainees' designation as "enemy combatants" without testing the "evidence"), Col. Davis' next trick was to declare, the day after, that he would appear as a defense witness for Salim Hamdan at his next pretrial hearing in April. "I expect to be called as a witness," he explained, adding, "I'm more than happy to testify," and describing his decision, ominously for the administration, as "an opportunity to tell the truth."
The final blow to the Commissions – for now, at least – came yesterday, when, without even attempting to address Col. Davis' allegations, the Pentagon abruptly announced that William Haynes was resigning as Chief Counsel, "to return to private life." A spokeswoman said that he had discussed leaving the administration "some months ago" and had "decided to accept an offer to work in the private sector." Col. Davis promptly gave him a less than friendly farewell. "I hope it will open the door for some positive change in the military commissions, but there are a couple of others still standing in the way," he said, adding, "At least the odds are very good that whoever takes his place will have a more collegial and less contemptuous relationship with the uniformed judge advocates."
If you hear any squeaking, amid the deafening silence from Haynes himself, I'd suggest that it's the sound of another rat leaving a sinking ship.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Guantanemo Show Trials : "We can't have acquittals".
« Reply #1 on: 2008-06-03 14:18:43 » |
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[Blunderov] Nope. No acquittals. Not now. Not ever.
Lacking, as they apparently do, even the slightest semblance of stage management talent I wonder why they bother to go through the motions of a "trial" at all?
tpmmuckraker
Guantanamo Judge Dismissed
By Andrew Tilghman - May 30, 2008, 1:52PM
Top military officials provided no explanation for why they dismissed the judge presiding over a key case at Guantanamo Bay.
The Miami Herald reports that the colonel presiding over the case had issued some rulings in favor of the defendant, Canadian national Omar Khadr.
Khadr's case has been on track to be one of the first to trial at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr, the son of an alleged al Qaeda financier, is accused of throwing a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. Special Forces soldier.
Military prosecutors had been pressing Brownback to set a trial date, but he has repeatedly directed them first to satisfy defense requests for access to potential evidence. At a hearing earlier this month, he threatened to suspend the proceedings altogether unless the detention center provided records of Khadr's confinement.
Kuebler said he believed the U.S. military is anxious for the trial to start before political pressure leads Canada to demand Khadr's repatriation.
Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement describing the abrupt change without explanation as evidence that the war court, created by Congress in 2006, is ``fundamentally flawed.''
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