The US has lost 75% of Gitmo habeas cases. If I’m reading the story correctly, there are 181 prisoners at Guantanamo, and over 100 of them have filed habeas cases, so if the record holds, the number of prisoners there may be cut in half in the near future.
3/4
by $8 blue check mistermix| 68 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Cat Lady
This news will give Mitt Romney a sad.
EconWatcher
Guess we know why they tried so hard for a ruling that habeas petitions aren’t allowed from Gitmo detainees.
PaulW
You mean by the end of the habeus cases we’ll only have 25 or so real terrorists to detain forever? And the wingnuts are STILL absolutely terrified of housing them in a federal prison in Nowheresville, MO?
stuckinred
Check out the “It’s fun to shoot some people” new head of Centcom!
me
@Cat Lady: Naw, with fewer prisoners, doubling it will be so much easier!
sal
Ha ha, that’s a good one.
Ash Can
Right-wingers bitching about activist judges in 3…2…1…
WereBear
Well, if they aren’t superhuman Eeeeeeeeeevil, why are we destroying our country to fight them?
If they were anything less than that, the wingnut arguments would crumble further.
Newsouthzach
I haven’t harrassed my Congresscritters in a while, and I feel like doing my patriotic duty tonight. What should I be outraged about?
fmbJo
Just cuz they won their case doesn’t mean they are out of Gitmo. Remember, “Terrorists, terrorists, etc”
mclaren
Now you’ve hit on the fundamental reason why the executive branch has considered it so vitally important to maintain secrecy and assert national security in the war on terror…
…Because if they abandoned secrecy and sent accused terrorists to trial in ordinary courts, it would be revealed that the so-called “war on terror” was a gigantic fraud and that almost all of the accused terrorists were innocent bystanders.
Most Guantanamo detainees are innocent: ex-Bush official
The so-called “war on terror” is nothing more than an hysterical reaction by panicked politicians to a public demand that something, anything be done in response to 9/11.
The politicians ran out and ordered the U.S. military to “round up terrorists no matter what the cost,” and the result was exactly the same thing that happens when the public demands action after some particularly heinous crime: a bunch of innocent people got rounded up and railroaded.
Almost all the falsely accused so-called “terrorists” rounded up by the U.S. army after 9/11 were innocent cabdrivers and goat herders who got sold to U.S. forces by corrupt warlords who lied in order to cash in on the rich rewarded offered by our government.
It’s the exact same thing that happens when domestic DEA operatives offer huge cash payments to informants who will rat out big drug dealers — the informants lie and finger innocent people as major drug dealers, the DEA breaks down their doors, turns out the person isn’t a drug dealer at all, so the police lie and plant some evidence. Eventually these kinds of cases always unravel and it ends up in an acquittal and huge damages paid in settlement to the innocent person who was falsely accused.
Yet this kind of thing keeps happened in the War on Drugs, over and over and over again, and it’s happening in the War on Terror. The only difference is that in the War on Terror it’s possible for the government to cover up the whole scandal by declaring all the evidence “a matter of national security” and refusing to try accused terror suspects in normal courts where the evidence of all the prosecutorial misconduct might come out. So instead the government sets up secret prisons and tortures the suspects into making false confessions and then convicts them in military commission kangaroo courts so grossly unfair that the government’s own prosecutor resigned from those military commissions.
President Obama has continued the kangaroo court military commissions (which are really just the American version of Stalinist show trials, with not a shred of justice in them, all the “evidence” obtained by torture and all the verdicts fixed in advance) and President Obama has continued the practice of torturing accused terror suspects.
The drunk-driving C student and his torturer sidekick who formerly infested the Oval Office should be dragged out bodily, tasered, and hauled before the international court at The Hague in chains in orange jumpsuits for crimes against humanity. President Obama, who has continued those crimes (torture, rigged kangaroo trials, assassination of innocent women and children and the continued mass murder of innocent children and women in wedding parties and funerals in Aghanistan and Pakistan by air force drones) also needs to be hauled in front of the international court at The Hague and tried for crimes against humanity.
Until American presidents stop kidnapping and torturing innocent people and mass-murdering innocent people, whether by means of JSOC assassination death squads or by remote-controlled drones which have a 96% rate of killing innocent people, every American president needs to be arrested and put in chains and dragged in front of the international court at The Hague for crimes against humanity.
Torture is a war crime. Kidnapping innocent civilians and murdering them is a war crime. Deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians is a war crime.
Until American presidents stop committing these war crimes, every American president needs to be arrested and tried for war crimes.
sparky
1. for the USG to lose on a habeas petition means that there literally is no evidence to support the snatching in the first place. none, as in “not any”.
2. don’t expect to see these individuals out of jail any time soon.
3. if you can’t win, redefine the issue: guess it’s time to open a prison in Afghanistan where the US court system can’t reach. go team Obama!
stuckinred
@mclaren: Feel better now?
bkny
and these men have been held captive for years without trial. USA! USA! USA!
Face
“there” being the key word. Because Bangrahm (sp?) in Afghanny has already been Court Approved(TM) by Activist Judges(TM) to be Aye-OK for indefinite prison detention.
Which is where these clowns are now destined to be housed.
Sly
@Ash Can:
They won’t just be bitching, they’ll be imploding, even though the ruling in MA is a conservative one in the traditional sense. Tauro invalidated Section 3 of DOMA (the only one that matters) purely on the grounds of Federal overreach.
We’re for States Rights except in every case where we aren’t!
mclaren
If you believe that Obama will release any of the Gitmo kidnap victims who’ve now been proven mistakenly abducted without evidence, you’re hopelessly naive.
The Obama administration. Not the Bush administration. The Obama administration.
Read the whole thing and weep: Pute Kafka
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
@PaulW:
Correction, Paul, it’s nowheresville, Illinois.
Uloborus
Sigh. First of all, Bagram doesn’t operate or have to operate under the same rules as Guantanamo. Whether or not it’s operating under proper rules is harder to say, because Mclaren wildly inflates anything having to do with civil rights, and links to other articles that do the same. Bagram is a military prison in a war zone. Hint: Military prisoners in a war zone are not put into civilian courts, and Afghanistan is an actual bloody war zone. Please note that nothing he links to provides even a shred of evidence of either beatings or a second base, only rumors that are taken as obvious fact.
Second, I doubt seriously these people will be tried, or released. Not because of Obama’s lack of desire to try them. What exactly can he DO with them? Congress goes apeshit every time he tries to put anyone in a civilian prison or try them. They can and have blocked each attempt. What exactly is the man supposed to do?
Oh, and Mclaren? Military tribunals are consistent with international law. Sorry.
JD Rhoades
Remember, in Wingnuttia, only American citizens have rights. And, regardless of where they were born, people with funny names like Hamdi or Padilla don’t count as citizens.
mclaren
@Uloborus:
Sigh. First of all, claiming that secret prisons which systematically ignore the Geneva conventions and the UN convention on torture as well as the laws of war operate under any kind of “rules” is a lie, and fundamentally dishonest.
Bagram, like Guantanamo, remains a secret prison beyond the reach of law. Once you’re outside the law and operating with prisonsers without names in cells without numbers, anything goes. There are no rules.
Hint: calling innocent cab drivers like Dilawar “military prisoners in a war zone” is another lie. These are innocent civilians picked up for no reason without evidence, and calling them names (“military prisoners”) doesn’t wipe out of existence the gross injustice that is being done.
Oh, and Uloboros? When the U.S. army’s lead prosecutor resigns because the army is withholding exculpatory evidence and rigging the military commissions, this is a sign that something is terribly horribly wrong.
Since you operate by the motto that if at first you don’t succeed, lie and lie again, we haven’t head the end of you, Uloboros.
Nick
@mclaren: Of course he won’t, because one he’s releases them, he’ll be skewered for it and God forbid they should actually become terrorists now that we’ve made them hate America more than they ever could.
They’re in legal limbo.
burnspbesq
@sparky:
Not a correct statement of the applicable law. If it were, no one would ever win a habeas case. The petitioner has to demonstrate that his/her current confinement is contrary to law. And for nearly all of the Gitmo detainees, that is not a terribly high hurdle.
John Bird
Well, yes, that’s because Guantanamo Bay violates basic tenets of democracy, as does indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, military tribunals where civilian courts have existing jurisdiction, etc.
I hope we all know that after being told that by everyone else on the planet for the last ten years. Maybe the White House and Justice Department will even agree to give up their own authoritarian Bush-established powers for the good of our democratic system and the integrity of their campaign promises (ha ha ha, a ho ho ho ho, a ha, I slay me).
burnspbesq
@mclaren:
Great. You continue to advocate for things that you must know are never going to happen, for a wide variety of reasons that have been repeatedly explained to you. Got a Plan B that might be feasible? Cuz if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
John Bird
I sure wish that Eric Holder was part of the solution, but I guess…ermm…
burnspbesq
@mclaren:
When you’re ready to prove any of that, we’re ready to listen. Unsubstantiated allegations are not the same as facts. And you know that. But it’s inconvenient to your narrative, so you ignore it.
John Bird
If it’s a war between the Poor Powerless Presidency vs. Truman’s “the buck stops here”, I can tell you where most Democrats are going to fall.
Bill H
@Uloborus:
All very well, but the exemption sort of goes out the window when the prisoner seeking habeas petition was not captured on any battlefield, but was taken off the street in some village in, say, Italy and transported to Bagram.
JG
@burnspbesq:
Advocating that the United States conform to international legal norms is now being “part of the problem.” The left in this country has some serious problems, namely apologizing for extreme radicalism and just shrugging it off as if it is no big deal.
Norwegian Shooter
@sparky: On 3. too late, we’ve already got one at Bagram. And the admin is still thinking about introducing a preventative detention law.
John Bird
Here’s another thing: do you think we’d even HAVE the modern administrative state if Democrats had settled for “oh, well, the Presidency is restricted by the other branches of government, so we just can’t do the things we need to do and promised to do.”
Some of FDR’s attempts to restructure Washington worked, some of them didn’t, but simply attributing his real victories and powerful initiatives to a (regionally split) Democratic majority that we don’t have is an absolute trainwreck of a long-term strategy, because guess what, my ducklings and poppets, we might not get a bigger majority than this one for a long time.
Instead, we get the exact sort of continued expansion of executive power that the White House knows won’t be challenged – fear-based, hard-to-reclaim gifts from Congress to the President allowing the violation of civil liberties and the prosecution of endless war. Would that we saw the same gumption when it comes to executive agencies and the well-being of the domestic population as individuals rather than duct-taped PATRIOTs.
Norwegian Shooter
@Uloborus: While Bagram is a military prison in a war zone, we routinely render detainees there from around the globe. Thus, you have to consider the whole world a war zone, which the admin actually does, to justify it. The geographic scope and unlimited time frame of this “war” are the fundamental issues in detainee policy. Capturing someone who fires on our troops in Afghanistan and holding them until we leave (regardless of the efficacy of this) is lawful. Flying someone kidnapped in Karachi to Bagram is not.
“What exactly can he DO with them?”
He can release them. (See, Uighurs and recent release of two detainees to Germany) The political issue is finding some country who wants to take responsibility for someone who’s been illegally detained for 5 or more years. I would imagine that they might be mad. This is our problem and we have to take care of it, congressional blathering be damned.
Oh, and Uloborus, the MCA is unconstitutional, which is the controlling legal regime, as most detainees were not captured on a legitimate battlefield and they were not given Geneva Conventions protections.
ellaesther
I just read a book for review in which I was reminded of the case of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian-born terrorist who came to the US via Canada with the intention of planting a suitcase bomb at LAX.
He was caught, arrested, read his damn Miranda rights, gave a full confession and was convicted in an LA federal court. He’s now doing 22 years in prison.
But then, it was 1999/early 2000 when all this happened, when we were all young and innocent and didn’t realize that treating terrorism as a crime was a mistake and we should really just ignore our working justice system in order to torture and abuse prisoners to no good end (see: mistermix’s post).
Because, apparently, trusting the American justice system to work — trusting this nation’s cops, and the FBI, and our judges, and our prisons, and our prison officials — is letting the terrorists win.
Corner Stone
When this issue is discussed, I always find it instructive to see who makes the argument that we must continue breaking the law because we have already broken the law. And now it’s hard to do anything other than break the law.
Norwegian Shooter
@burnspbesq: You’re over parsing common sense language. Of course, there is something written down by the government that can be called “evidence”, but should properly be called allegations. The habeas rulings judge the strength of the allegations that the government provides. No strength at all (no evidence), and they are ordered to be released. This story, also by Carol Rosenberg, shows the level of “evidence” needed to deny habeas:
burnspbesq
@Norwegian Shooter:
Which court has held to that effect? Got a citation?
Different categories of state and non-state actors are entitled to different levels of protection under the Conventions. Would love to see your case-by-case analysis. Oh, what, you don’t have one? Damn, me and my unrealistic expectations.
Srsly, the Conventions are in need of an update. The drafters didn’t have the modern art of asymmetrical warfare in mind when they were drafting. It’s a bad fit. But to be clear, we are a signatory, and we are bound by it, and I agree that we have repeatedly violated it (I am not as ready as some others to say that we have “systematically” violated it, because I don’t think we really have a system – we are making it up as we go along).
burnspbesq
@Norwegian Shooter:
No, y’all are using terms legal terms that have established meanings in haphazard and sloppy fashion. Sometimes a law degree is a feature, not a bug. ;-)
Norwegian Shooter
Carol Rosenberg and the entire McClatchy organization have done tremendous work on Guantanamo. Their “Beyond the Law” webpage is a must read resource. There are excellent journalists out there, and they deserve praise and thanks.
burnspbesq
@Norwegian Shooter:
“Carol Rosenberg and the entire McClatchy organization have done tremendous work on Guantanamo. Their “Beyond the Law” webpage is a must read resource. There are excellent journalists out there, and they deserve praise and thanks.”
On that (if perhaps on little else) I agree.
Norwegian Shooter
@burnspbesq: Are you serious? Boumediene v. Bush declared the habeas-denying portion of the MCA of 2006 unconstitutional:
The MCA of 2009 did not try to design a new regime without habeas rights.
burnspbesq
@Norwegian Shooter:
Thanks for the reminder, but as you correctly point out, the holding in Boumediene is quite narrow. It is not the case that “the MCA has been held unconstitutional;” one part of it has (and correctly in my view).
Mnemosyne
@Norwegian Shooter:
That is not, however, a small political issue that you can handwave away as no big deal. It took something like three years for us to find someone who was willing to take the Uighers even though they’d been proven innocent years before that.
We can’t take people who have been shown to be innocent into the US, because Congress has blocked it. But because Congress has blocked it, many of our allies have (rightly) decided that they don’t want us pawning those ex-prisoners off on them if our Congress thinks they’re too dangerous to release into the US.
As usual, Congress’ cowardice has fucked us over. We now have a group of ex-prisoners who need to be released but who no country will accept. What are we supposed to do, drop them off in airports all over the world and hope for the best?
John Bird
@Corner Stone:
No, no, no, what we need to do is make more laws so we’re not breaking the law anymore, just violating the Constitution. And that’s not a law! It’s just something the courts like to wave in our faces whenever Lieberman has a good idea.
Bill H
@burnspbesq:
“Asymmetrical warfare” as in hanging yourself to death in your prison cell to make your captor “look bad” perhaps?
I can never see that word without recalling the movie Space Cowboys where one of the old guys says to the other that he is going to take him outside and “I’m going to kick your asymmetrical ass.” (Sorry.)
John Bird
I’d like to propose a bill stating that people who are arrested for terrorism are bad guys, and that anyone who says or does anything that looks like coddling them is a bad guy, and that they suck and probably don’t need the Bill of Rights or anything.
I bet it would fly through committee and pass on a voice vote.
IM
He can release them. (See, Uighurs and recent release of two detainees to Germany)
Well, yes. But:
1. We did discuss this in Germany for two years – and so stalled for two years.
2. In the process we whittled down the number from ten to two.
Taking in ten people two years ago would have been important, if more for smbolic reasons. But now it is more a symbol of the problem than of a solution.
Norwegian Shooter
@Mnemosyne:
I did not handwave the problem away. Releasing innocent detainees in the US will take tremendous political courage, certainly more than the President has now, but it can be done. The executive has the power to release detainees, in fact it is ordered to do so in 37 habeas cases so far. If no other country will take them, we are responsible for them. As for Congress, after the actual release, someone would have to bring a suit to enforce the law, then the law’s constitutionality would be argued. While that plays out, the detainee would be in the US.
Some day there is going to be a Guantanamo detainee living in the US. The question is when.
Here’s an off the cuff idea: is there a US Catholic monastery that would take a detainee?
IM
But because Congress has blocked it, many of our allies have (rightly) decided that they don’t want us pawning those ex-prisoners off on them if our Congress thinks they’re too dangerous to release into the US.
As our minister for interior affairs argued back then: if the US does now want to take in one of the 200 (then) prisoners, why should we take in ten?
Excuses. But the fault still did rest with the US, because they would say: yes, we can send you people, but you have to guarantee a 24 hour supervision.
burnspbesq
@Bill H:
Oh, come on. You know exactly what I was referring to: “asymmetrical warfare” in terms of (to cite only one example) combatants in civilian clothes invading the homes of civilians in order to take advantage of our rules of engagement, in between planting roadside bombs that present an equal risk to combatants and civilians. “Asymmetrical warfare” in terms of (to cite another example) suicide bombings aimed at civilians in an effort to keep them from cooperating with the properly constituted government.
Show me where in the Geneva Conventions, or any other authoritative statement of modern law-of-war principles, it tells us how to deal with that stuff.
I’m mostly on your side on this stuff. But ridiculous shit like that doesn’t help you make friends or influence people.
Mnemosyne
@Norwegian Shooter:
The executive has the power to legally release the detainees, but not the power to bring them to the US. So now you have (as you did with the Uighers) people who are no longer considered prisoners but are still held at Guantanamo because we have nowhere we can transport them to.
Since Congress has forbidden the released prisoners from being brought to the US by law, what’s your plan? No amount of complaining about the president lacking “political courage” can handwave away the fact that it is illegal for the president to bring the former prisoners here. I know that having the president break the law for a good reason sounds great — hey, if the president does it, it’s not illegal, right? — but it tends not to work out well in the end.
Mnemosyne
BTW, I’m not saying there’s nothing that can be done so we just have to leave everyone rotting forever, hi ho. I’m saying we need to aim the pressure at Congress since they’re the ones who have actually caused the problem. We need to keep finding a workaround in the meantime because keeping innocent people confined is monstrous, but we shouldn’t be misled into thinking we have this problem because Obama isn’t doing something that he legally could be doing.
And I don’t blame the other countries for refusing to take the people that Congress claims are too dangerous to live in the US. Why should they have to fix our problems for us?
IM
Since Congress has forbidden the released prisoners from being brought to the US by law, what’s your plan?
Is this true, literally? Shouldn’t your existing immigration law give the administration some room to act?
There are always special rules for some immigrants – cubans e. g. Is all this law or does rest some of it on presidentiaöld decisions?
I just think there is some existing rule that says: the president can let people immigrate in exceptional cases of national interest.
Mnemosyne
@IM:
It’s all law. Cuban immigration is governed by the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act, and the “wet foot, dry foot” policy is written into that law.
The executive branch (which the president is a part of) enforces the law and cannot contravene laws that Congress has passed. That’s one of the problems with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell that we’re having to deal with — it’s an actual law that was passed by Congress, so the president can only nibble around the edges and can’t actually change the law or make any directives that go against the law.
Mnemosyne
BTW, Congress just blocked the closure of Guantanamo and the release of any prisoners again, so the administration is still pushing for it.
IM
That’s one of the problems with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell that we’re having to deal with—it’s an actual law that was passed by Congress, so the president can only nibble around the edges and can’t actually change the law or make any directives that go against the law.
Yes. But as far as I understand prior to DADT the discrimination against gays was just practice in the military and not prescribed by law. And the reason truman could end segregation in the military was that on the federal level it never was laid down in law, but just practice and presidential decisions.
So I wanted to ask if there is expressive law or just a congressional resolution, a budget decision etc.
Norwegian Shooter
@Mnemosyne:
So where are the detainees now, Cuba? The US Constitution is in force on GTMO, the US military literally controls the base and everyone on it, and there are no other claimants to sovereignty there. It is a Bushian fiction or technical absurdity to think they aren’t in the US now.
Mnemosyne
@IM:
It was just practice prior to the law against it being passed. That’s why the law was passed — Republicans had control of Congress and they wanted to block Clinton from issuing an executive order that would allow gay and lesbian servicemembers to serve openly.
Not correct — segregation of the miltary actually was a law passed by Congress but, at that point, it had not yet been decided whether or not the president could contravene a Congressional law via executive order. So that executive order went through but, when Truman tried to contravene a different law via executive order, he was blocked from doing so by the Supreme Court. Bill Clinton was also blocked from doing something similar when he tried to make an executive order that voided government contracts with companies that employed strike-breakers.
That’s why DADT can’t officially end until Congress passes a law ending it though, as I said, the president could be doing more to nibble around the edges by doing things like blocking dismissals from the service.
Mnemosyne
@Norwegian Shooter:
Ironically, that’s part of Congress’ argument — since they’re already “in” the US, then there’s no need to move them to the mainland.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
Idiots. Riddle me this, Republicans: when was the last successful escape from the Federal Supermax, Leavenworth, or Marion?
IM
Well, thank you, I actually learned something.
Whatever, as long as the US will not take a single ex-Guantanamo inmate other countries will be reluctant too. And the fact that congress is worse, like Greenwald says, is quite unimportant to the outer world. Looks all like US to us.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Face:
This is flat out false, and I’m very tired of people repeating it despite having been told that it’s false. The Court said in its opinion that it applied *only* to past cases, and only because Bagram had not been used as a place to take prisoners for the purpose of evading various constitutional restrictions. It explicitly said that, if the administration starts sending prisoners there for that purpose, the Court would expect to have to make a ruling based upon the new facts. So, it has not been so approved.
The “secret detention facility” at Bagram is similarly subject to serious exaggeration. Yes, there is a portion of the facility in which prisoners are held without any access by the Red Cross. However, there are several very important distinctions between this facility and similar ones run by the Bush administration:
1) The Red Cross is not allowed access to the prisoners, but they are informed of the identity of anyone who is taken there. A prisoner’s family is also informed. The prisoners do not simply disappear; there is a record of them.
2) While there are allowed interrogation methods that superficially resemble those of the past, they really aren’t the same. Take sleep deprivation: the rules in force say that a prisoner can’t be kept awake and interrogated for more than 32 hours. That’s not torture. I’m sure that there are violations of the rules, and they should be prosecuted, but that’s a very different animal.
3) Most importantly, prisoners can only be kept at this “secret” facility for two weeks. After that, they have to be transferred to the general population, with Red Cross access and everything else.
Frankly, so long as it’s temporary and short term, with restrictions on how the prisoner can be treated, I don’t have a problem with holding them in isolation.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@IM: I don’t mind foreigners just blaming “the US.” We’re a representative democracy, so we deserve it. It’s the folks who try to narrow it down to who within the US should be blamed that need to be careful. Having actual knowledge of what’s going on is important.
IM
Having actual knowledge of what’s going on is important.
Yes. But, making congress – controlled by democarts by the way – all powerful and the president powerless is not helpful. It is not good to counter the myth of the presidency with a counter-myth.
Take habeas corpus: As far as I understood, the administration is challenging every habeas corpus decision of the district courts. Is congress really forcing them do this? Could congress even force them? I don’t think so.
The administration could say: That is it, we tried to prove our case,w e lost and know we accept the verdict and let him go. They don’t do it. And that, in the end is Obamas fault.
General Stuck
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal: Thank you for this comment. Not to challenge it, but to have sourcing for future debates on this topic, i would like to request you give your sourcing on the items listed as protocol for the Bagram prison and it’s isolation unit. thanx!
CalD
Guess that’s one way to close it.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@General Stuck: The New York Times:
On sleep deprivation, the stories talked about how the facility operates under Appendix M of the relevant Army Field Manual. That includes this:
I remember reading the 32 hour figure somewhere, but I can’t remember where. That would be a violation of this statement, but, again one that I think falls far short of being torture. FWIW, I suffer from severe insomnia. Without pharmaceutical aid, I can’t sleep. I’ve been awake as long as somewhere between 86 and 94 hours (it gets kind of hard to keep track of after a while) while switching from one drug to another and waiting for the old one to get out of my system. Being awake for 32 hours when you’re tired really, really sucks, but I wouldn’t classify it as torture.
What I cited above are not the sources I originally got this from. I can’t find those. A Google search turns up far too many hits for me to sort through to find those specific ones.
CharleyCarp
IM, the government has not appealed even half of the judgments granting the writ.
TMAYP: It’s a good thing to have rules, really it is. But one shouldn’t act as if having a rule in place means that that’s how things are done. I’ve seen plenty of people driving plenty fast, despite the speed limits. Rules against robbery haven’t stamped it out. Petty abuse of GTMO inmates by (a minority, as I understand it) guards takes place, and rules can’t stop it. Bagram guards may or may not be following the rules generally. No one should ever assume that compliance is perfect.
Congress hasn’t enacted any law wrt GTMO that the President hasn’t signed. He had an opportunity to lead in early 2009 but, IMO, let it get away.
Mnem: In no way is Congress arguing or providing that GTMO inmates are already in the US. Everyone, esp. Sen. Graham, is aware that there are still important legal differences in their status being held where they are, and being moved to the US. Where they are, they can’t (currently) get an order compelling the Navy to open the door of the prison to let them out, if they win. If they were in the US, they would be entitled to such an order. This is a very big deal for those winners who cannot return to the country of their citizenship.
burnspb: Wouldn’t it be a great idea if a bunch of countries got together and wrote up some protocols to add to Geneva to deal with developments in the 30 or so years since 1949? And even better if you could get 163 countries to sign on. You’d just need the right ones.
Anyway, compliance with the Third Geneva Convention has been extraordinarily poor, and noncompliance continues to this date. These men, being held because they are allegedly members of the ‘enemy force’ aren’t entitled to the 3GC, you say? Well, they are unless proven differently by an appropriate process. Which hasn’t been done.
In any case, it’s not just a question of international law. it’s a constitutional question whether the US government can detain individual human beings without due process, and without recourse.