More Gitmo Insanity - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

kutulu · 06-30-2006, 02:55 PM

I'll start out by saying that with this post I'm not saying that any particular people there are or are not innocent. Their guilt is irrelevant to the content of the article. It just shows (once again) that the situation there is screwed up.

Quote:

The US government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days.

Two years ago the US military invited Mr Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander accused of plotting against the United States, to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal. As was his right, Mr Mujahid called four witnesses from Afghanistan.

But months later the tribunal president returned with bad news: the witnesses could not be found. Mr Mujahid's hopes sank and he was returned to the wire-mesh cell where he remains today.

The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid's witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai. Another was teaching at a leading American college. The third was living in Kabul. The fourth, it turned out, was dead. Each witness said he had never been approached by the Americans to testify in Mr Mujahid's hearing.

The case illustrates the egregious flaws that have discredited Guantánamo-style justice and which led the US supreme court to declare such trials illegal on Thursday in a major rebuke to the Bush administration. Mr Mujahid is one of 380 Guantánamo detainees whose cases were reviewed at "combatant-status review tribunals" in 2004 and 2005. The tribunals were hastily set up following a court ruling that the prisoners, having been denied all normal legal rights, should be allowed to prove their innocence. Ten of the hearings proceeded to full trials, including that of Osama bin Laden's aide, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who brought the successful supreme court appeal.

But by the time the review tribunals ended last year the US government had located just a handful of the requested witnesses. None was brought from overseas to testify. The military lawyers simply said they were "non-contactable".

That was not entirely true.

Abdullah Mujahid was originally identified by Washington-based reporters from the Boston Globe after trawling through thousands of pages of testimony from the controversial military trials. US forces arrested Mr Mujahid in the southern Afghan city of Gardez in mid-2003, claiming he had been fired as police chief due to suspicion of "collusion with anti-government forces", according to official documents. Later, they alleged, he attacked US forces in retaliation.

In the military tribunal Mr Mujahid protested his innocence. He enjoyed good relations with American soldiers and had been promoted, not fired, he said. The three living witnesses he requested were easily located with a telephone, an internet connection and a few days work.

Shahzada Massoud was at the presidential palace, where he advises Mr Karzai on tribal affairs. Gul Haider, a former defence ministry official, was found through the local government in Gardez.

The interior ministry gave an email address for the former minister, Ahmed Ali Jalali, although he could as easily been found on the internet - he teaches at the National Defence University in Washington DC.

The witnesses largely corroborated Mr Mujahid's story, with some qualifications. Mr Jalali, the former interior minister, said Mr Mujahid had been fired over allegations of corruption and bullying - not for attacking the government. Mr Haider, the former defence official, said Mr Mujahid had contributed 30 soldiers to a major operation against al-Qaida in March 2002. "He is completely innocent," he said.

Other Afghans agreed. General Ali Shah Paktiawal, Interpol director of the Afghan national police, said: "Some people have given false information about him and that's why this problem has come up."

Their testimonies do not necessarily exonerate Mr Mujahid but at the very least raise serious questions about the case against him. An Afghan government delegation that recently visited Guantánamo estimated that half of the 94 Afghan detainees were not guilty of serious crimes and should be released. They did not release any names.

In Gardez, Haji Muhammad Hasan, 65, keeps a stack of Red Cross letters as the only proof of his son's whereabouts. "I feel completely helpless," he said in despair. Beside him the detainee's shy sons - aged three, four and five - waited for news of a father they could hardly recall.

Lies and old rivalries had sent many innocent Afghans to Guantánamo, said Taj Muhammad Wardak, a former governor of Paktiya. "You can investigate these people here. There is no need to send them to Guantánamo," he said. "It is a great sadness between our countries that will last for many years."

This is bullshit. If a newspaper can find some witnesses in a couple of days that means that the military made no real attempt to locate any of them. This means that the tribunals offerred to these people were merely a formality to make it seem like they were doing something. Another embarrassment thanks to our government.

Willravel · 06-30-2006, 03:05 PM

Well aren't there going to be people released due to the Supreme Court ruling? I mean the Judicial branch is still one third of the government, for god's sake.

filtherton · 06-30-2006, 03:26 PM

No, they aren't going to be released, they just can't be tried in military tribunals without the consent of congress.

Willravel · 06-30-2006, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by filtherton

No, they aren't going to be released, they just can't be tried in military tribunals without the consent of congress.

Well I suppose getting them released is wishful thinking, but I'd like to see at least SOME change. That place is still holding innocent people.

filtherton · 06-30-2006, 03:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Well I suppose getting them released is wishful thinking, but I'd like to see at least SOME change. That place is still holding innocent people.

I'm pretty sure gitmo is modeled on the cuban system of criminal justice, so innocence is probably irrelevant. I do agree that they should release the innocent people. The problem with conducting a war like the war on terrorism is that, depending on how paranoid you want to be, everyone is a potential terrorist.

I do understand the reasoning behind holding people indefinitely, it just doesn't really seem all that in line with the kind of justice we in america tend to claim to believe in.

host · 06-30-2006, 05:01 PM

What, on earth...have we Americans allowed ourselves to become? Why have we allowed Bush and Cheney's reaction to the 9/11 attacks be the final word, the final authority in what used to be a republic with an elected representative government and a constitution that was admired as a model for the people of other nations to aspire to?

I apologize for protesting so meekly on these threads, and in my daily non-internet related communications.

What is it that we still believe we can "export" as far as a fair and democratic influence, to iraq, or to any other foreign locales.....given the following:

Quote:

The General, the New York Times and the Gitmo Suicides
The Evil of Banality

By ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI

There are moments that require us to stop everything and take stock of the time in which we are living. This is one such moment. Listen:

"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

This is Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison. His words appeared, without comment, in the first news reports about three men, detained indefinitely and subjected to systematic torture at the prison, who committed suicide on Saturday by hanging themselves in their cells.

Take a moment to dwell on the admiral's words. Look especially at the first sentence, at the adjectives used to describe the dead men: "smart, creative, committed." There is a perverse compliment being paid by the torturer to the tortured.

This attitude is also implicit in the follow-up article printed by the New York Times the next day, with the headline: "Prisoners' Ruse Is Suspected at Guantanamo." This, we learn from the article, should be the focus of inquiry: not the circumstances that drove three men to their deaths, but the question of how, given the fact that one of the elements of their confinement was constant monitoring by their captors, these men could have managed their "ruse."

The point of systematic torture, of course, is to force the tortured to acknowledge, every minute of every day, that his life is in the hands of his torturer. No wonder, then, that the prison's commanders and their willing mouthpieces in the press are alarmed. In the most macabre and tragic sense, these are the first escapees from Guantanamo.

Of course these were acts of despair, no matter what the torturers may claim. Of course the many attempts by prisoners at Guantanamo to use their bodies-all that is left to them-to protest against their systematic and agonizing dehumanization have been acts of desperation. Many of their ongoing efforts-for example, the hunger strikes that have been violently broken through force-feedings-have been the tactics of resistance used by other political prisoners: Irish prisoners held by the British in Northern Ireland, South Africans in apartheid jails, Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

These are acts of desperation, but in their tragic way, they are also attempts to claim back some shred of humanity from the grasp of the torturers. And so even the capacity to feel despair has to be denied them by the torturers, at the very moment of their deaths. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," the admiral assures us, "but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Leave aside "asymmetrical" for the moment, although under different circumstances a sustained meditation on the abuse of language inherent in the use of this term would be in order. Go right to this phrase: "an act of warfare waged against us."

For this is the lynchpin of it all. "They" are being held in Guantanamo, according to this version of the story, for having waged, or tried to wage, or plotted to wage, or thought about waging, war against "us" (thus the invention of the wholly unprecedented but vaguely legal-sounding term "enemy combatants"). The subsequent charge of "terrorism" is itself potent enough to preclude any further inquiry, and, more important, to eliminate any concern for the treatment of the human beings--human no longer, since they are now of the species known as "terrorist"--during their confinement. The dehumanization carried out through the physical acts of torture at Guantanamo (and, it should be added, at prisons subsidized and run by the U.S. government throughout the world) is thus both enabled and completed through this linguistic torture.

When the flesh-and-blood human beings being held captive assert their humanity through their bodies, whether through hunger strikes or through suicide attempts, the linguistic torturers have to work overtime. But they are able to do their work without much worry about systematic opposition in this country. The White House dutifully described the three men as "committed terrorists," and in response, Democrats said nothing, since, as the *Times* reported, they are "concerned about appearing to be sympathizing with detainees who could turn out to have significant terrorist connections."

Here we should pause again. Three men at Guantanamo were, in essence, tortured to death. Their names were Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi, Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmedwho.

What is most appalling about the discourse surrounding their suicides is the banality of the language used to address their deaths. It is as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. This is what should startle us out of our complacency: the thought that a situation in which three men were literally driven to their deaths by the inhumanity of their treatment is in fact all in a day's work for our government.

There are of course groups and individuals who have tried to break this sense of complacency and to place Guantanamo, and the U.S. government's policies of detainment, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, and systematic torture more generally, before the eyes of Americans. But the fact that these men's suicides can be reported as "ruses" and "acts of war" without provoking outrage reminds us of how much remains to be done.

One important part of this effort is to combat the specifically dehumanizing work being done by the word "terrorist." It is not necessary to prove the innocence of those being held prisoner at Guantanamo in order to demand an end to their torture. Of course, a cursory glance at the insane methods used to capture those who are now detained there suggests that no legal case could be made against the vast majority of the prisoners.

But the fundamental insistence should be that it simply does not matter. Allowing the focus to be shifted to the question of innocence versus guilt, of good and evil, of terrorism and acts of war, avoids addressing the heart of the matter. Worse, it allows a shift into the banal language that allows for generalizations about "us" and "them," the very language that underwrites the abuses of humanity carried out by this government through its terroristic "war on terror."

The real focus must be on a place whose sole purpose is to torture people until the only recourse that remains available to them is to somehow bring about their own deaths. The focus must be on the fact that Guantanamo is not simply an anomaly, not just an embarrassing example of this government's zeal after September 2001 whose closure will also close that distressing chapter. The focus must be on the larger set of processes set in motion by this government, of which Guantanamo is simply the most visible manifestation.

Appeals to the government to close down Guantanamo are not nearly enough right now. We have to do more to make known the full extent of the horror. Guantanamo Bay is not simply a place where men are dressed in orange jumpsuits and placed in cages. It is a place where humanity is being systematically destroyed. This is no metaphor. Perhaps it is time to see that the responsibility for closing down Guantanamo belongs, not to George W. Bush, but to us.

Listening to the admiral, to the most recent expression of the banality of evil flowing from his lips, only one conclusion can be drawn: the United States has absented itself from humanity. Until those living in this country can find a way to stop this government, the admiral's phrase should be applied to us: "They have no regard for life."

Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY in Brooklyn, NY, and is a member of the Action Wednesdays Against War collective in New York City. He can be reached at tonyalessandrini@yahoo.com.

In a truly troubling way, aren't many of us who perceive the wrong done by our government, in reaction to, or as an excuse because of "9/11", but who cannot find it within themselves to do what it would take to personally attempt to stop it from continuing, being "tortured to death", in a slower but similar way to the Gitmo prisoners?

Yeah....sometimes.....like after reading the thread OP, or the essay above, or the Gitmo commandant's comments, or the talk emanating from congress in reaction to the Hamdan SCOTUS decision, expressing a "desire" to work with the administration to continue to support the current adminstration policies at Gitmo, and the Bush "signing statements", the warrantless domestic surveillance.....I feel a hurt and a sadness all the way into the center of my spirit....and I , too want to leave all of this behind.....forever. I can still leave this train wreck via a plane ticket.......the Gitmo prisoners cannot.

I don't know whether to envy you folks who are still pumped up enough to believe in what you're told; in what our government's post 9/11 policies are
said to be accomplishing, whether to feel sorry for you, or whether to try to get as far away from you as possible, because part of me needs to perceive no commonality with you. I don't like what I see myself turning into...being a complacent American in these times. I don't feel worthy right now of even calling myself an American, because I'm not doing everything I could to stop the madness described above. If Gitmo was attacked by a foreign entity, it would certainly be described as U.S. territory. How mighty and noble is a great power that has to excuse it's operation of a concentration camp by using the flimsy claim that it is not located on it's sovereign territory?

06-30-2006, 03:05 PM	#2 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Well aren't there going to be people released due to the Supreme Court ruling? I mean the Judicial branch is still one third of the government, for god's sake.

06-30-2006, 03:26 PM	#3 (permalink)
filtherton Junkie Location: In the land of ice and snow.	No, they aren't going to be released, they just can't be tried in military tribunals without the consent of congress.