Guantanamo Bay

Snooping around the internet for news relating to Rumsfeld’s disastrous tenure at the top job in the Pentagon two pieces were quite eye catching.

First, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, Richard Norton-Taylor ends with this:

In Britain, Rumsfeld was vilified by military commanders and senior officials. His decision to abandon the Iraq army directly contradicted a directive from Admiral, now Lord, Boyce, then chief of the defence staff who had instructed his commanders in the field to deal with Iraqi officers to help maintain law and order.

It is difficult to exaggerate the scorn directed at Rumsfeld this side of the Atlantic, among the military and security and intelligence agencies concerned – pragmatically – about the effect of Guantanamo Bay. He should be indicted, they say. But they say so privately because they are servants of the Blair government. And not one British minister dared to criticise Rumsfeld. That is one appalling feature of Rumsfeld’s destructive tenure of office.

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http://www.iht.com/ . . .

After Pres. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law, the Justice Department lost no time in informing the Guantanamo detainees who had cases pending questioning the legality of their detention that these cases were now moot.

Likewise, defense lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees have lost no time in lodging an appeal.
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http://www.cageprisoners.com/ . . .

Major Mori, David Hicks military defense lawyer, is in Australia to brief MPs and to meet with Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock.

David Hicks, the last Australian detainee held at Guantanamo Bay (originally there were two Australians) has been detained by the US since his capture among Taliban forces in Afghanistan in December 2001. He pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, aiding the enemy and conspiracy, and was to appear before a US military commission.

But following the Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld Supreme Court ruling in June those charges were dropped. Subsequent to the passage of the new Military commissions Act into law, it is expected that Hicks will once again face similar charges under the new revamped military commissions system, which in most every respect is identical to the old discredited system. Major Mori has indicated that his client will once again plead not guilty.
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“the worst of the worst” ~~ Rumsfeld.
“We totally suck at the GWOT!” ~~ Miss Devore.

In honor of Halloween, who could resist such a quote?

“It’s the Salem witchcraft trials,” said Marc Falkoff of Covington and Burling’s New York City office, who represents 17 Yemenis, several of them fingered — falsely, according to Falkoff — by different accusers. “You get one guy to start making accusations, and whether it’s believable or not doesn’t matter.”

I am reading from an an article in National Journal that was published February 3rd. In that week’s edition, their reporter, Corine Hegland wrote three stories on Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and it was while doing her research that she interviewed a number of the attorneys that represented detainees.

This is an old article, eight months old in fact, and some things have changed at GTMO and some things haven’t. The overall predicament of the detainees has, if anything, gotten worse since these lawyers were interviewed. More quotes in the next segment.

Here is Thomas Wilner calling a spade a spade:

Thomas Wilner, a partner at the Washington law firm Shearman and Stearling who is representing six Kuwaitis at Guantanamo, summarized the evidence against them: “Bullshit hearsay…. The information in some cases is, at best, hearsay allegations long after capture.”

And the there is Anant Raut.

“The people you’ve been going up against in court have been saying he’s the worst of the worst, Osama’s right-hand man,” said Anant Raut, an attorney with the Washington firm of Weil, Gotshal, & Manges. “Then you go in there, and it’s a guy who is as confused as you are as to why he is there.” Raut has one client, a Saudi, who is classified as an enemy combatant largely because he spent a couple of weeks on a Taliban bean farm. The man says the Taliban imprisoned him there because they thought he was a Saudi government spy.

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http://today.reuters.com/ . . .

It appears that there was a press junket down to Guantanamo Bay last week that has given rise to a number of short stories in the press. My previous post is a case in point. How do I know this? Simple, the same phrase “… along the cactus and palm tree-lined shore …” crops up in all of the reports.

It’s got to remind you of that time last year when newspapers in Iraq published direct quotes from interviews of several different Iraqi individuals done at different times of day and in different locations … and yet these Iraqis all managed to come up with identical phrasing, even though none of them were related. That, the Pentagon was later forced to admit, was all their doing. It was supposed to get the Pentagon’s point of view across through the voices of the Iraq “man in the street”.
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http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ . . .

Construction Engineers for the military have been visiting Guantanamo earlier in the week to survey the prison camp in preparation for building courtrooms for military commissions and accommodations for trial lawyers. The Bush plan of action calls for military commissions for the 14 previously disappeared so-called al Qaeda terror suspects that have recently been discovered and fetched to GTMO – plus a further 60 or so longterm GTMO detainees that are actually considered to be guilty of something, though of what nobody is sure.

The trials may start sometime in the new year. But first there will have to be a considerble building effort to build as many as ten new courtrooms, plus housing for extra personel, plus services, power, water and sewage, roads and air-conditioning. The engineers are to submit their proposals to the Pentagon next week.

Brig. Gen. Edward Leacock, deputy commander of the joint task force that runs the facility holding more than 400 suspected terrorists, said the price tag could run into the “hundreds of millions.”

“The logistics end of it will be pretty significant,” Leacock said, referring to the cost and time needed to build the support infrastructure at the base, referred to as Gitmo.

“Gitmo does not have a Home Depot. The process of getting supplies and materials is a major operation. It takes a while to build things down here,” he told reporters on a small boat shuttling across the waters that separate a U.S. naval base from the military detention centre.

Presently there is only one courtroom at GTMO and not a very big one at that. There is only room for one detainee to be tried at a time, and the Bush plan of action requires that there be room for several detainees to be tried together.

Congressonal staff are going to be transported down to GTMO in the coming weeks so that they may see for themselves the actual plots of land where the new courts will be built.