From the left-wing anarchist firebaggers at NBC news:
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba — While the prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 attacks were in the Guantanamo courtroom this week, guards seized confidential legal documents, books, photos and even toilet paper from their cells, according to a prison camp lawyer.
Most of the seized items will be returned, the camp lawyer testified in a hearing Thursday marked by angry outbursts, eye-rolling and lengthy diversions from the docket in the war crimes court at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.
Defense lawyers said some defendants returned to their cells after court sessions earlier in the week to find that bins containing their legal documents had been ransacked and confidential papers relating to their defense were missing.
The seizures happened while the camp’s top legal adviser was on the witness stand giving assurances that no one was reading those private legal documents, said Cheryl Bormann, an attorney for defendant Walid Bin Attash….
Debbie(aussie)
Oh yes, Laws/justice, things that make the US exceptional ;)
Yutsano
Jeebus. That would be an instant motion to dismiss in a regular US court. Farce needs to end now, release them all.
NotMax
Good coverage on this from McClatchy last Thursday:
Photo of Mecca mosque, FBI agent’s memoirs seized at Guantanamo
Also too, from Wednesday last:
FBI hid microphones in Guantanamo, prison commander testifies
Higgs Boson's Mate
In order to save America it was necessary to destroy it.
PeakVT
Does the justice process at Guantanamo have any kind of integrity at this point, or is the government just going through the motions for PR purposes?
Cygil
Yeah, well, this is why I un-bookmarked Balloon Juice and spend most of my time, yes, reading the DFH firebagger anarchists at Firedoglake. I got sick of being patted on the head and told not to worry my pretty head over things like because “Dude, Chill. Obama’s got this, Dude.”
He’s the fucking president. He’s ultimately responsible. On civil liberties he’s further to the right than George W. Bush. Got this? Got it into your heads, people?
Alex
Zandar will be here in no time, you guys. He’ll explain how Obama COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE TO BE BLAME. And, in actuality, in 2013, these problems can be traced back to the Bush Administration. Or maybe to Nader.
TR
We need to work harder to turn the whole Muslim world against us.
Did I hear the rumor that the Muslim Pakistan had Nucs? LOL They probably don’t mind innocents being killed by drones.
El Cid
AUMF, people trying to kill us, we bombed people in WWII, etc., shut up.
pseudonymous in nc
@PeakVT:
It never did. It never will. Build a house on a cesspit and you’ll never be dealing with anything other than shit.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Yeah, well who needs civil liberties? We’ve got FREEDOM, you commies.
Greetings from the soshulist paradise of Germany. Universal health care, parental leave, lotsa vacation time, etc. I can’t wait to see how they maintain this obvious facade of a high standard of living and enviable productivity while indulging in soshulism. No clues yet but I’ll ferret out the truth. 7:00 am and time to see what passes for breakfast here.
Cheers
Scamp Dog
@PeakVT: It’s starting to sound like pseudo-PR purposes. Everybody knows it’s nonsense, but we MUST pretend it makes sense, or we’d have to acknowledge that we’re not the county we pretend we are.
pseudonymous in nc
@Alex:
Oh, go away. It was the massed wankers of Congress that declared that the Gitmo shitshow would continue, as Carol Rosenberg herself reported a year ago.
Yutsano
@Alex: Knockabout you got a new nym! How precious!!
@pseudonymous in nc: How DARE you bring things like facts into this? This is totes on Obummer! He could end this tomorrow if he wanted!
balconesfault
Isn’t this where we get a snarling Jack Nicholson telling us off for asking about what goes on in Gitmo?
FlipYrWhig
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Good thing Germany has always had a sterling record of abiding by values like justice and liberty!
FlipYrWhig
BTW, this story is pretty appalling.
Ted & Hellen
Oh no. Dear god, no.
Of course we must NOT hold the Commander In Chief responsible for anything I tell you, ANYTHING, that goes on in the military under his command.
I’m sure he knows NOTHING, nothing I tell you, about what goes on in this ridiculous show trial.
Christ, what a joke this government is.
scav
@FlipYrWhig: Germany seems at least to have eventually learned from her mistakes. Jury’s still out locally.
CT
Every white progressive blogger/commenter would do a better job of being president than the actual president.
Mandalay
@scav:
I would have thought that there was overwhelming evidence for “guilty” on that count. If there is one way that America is truly exceptional, it is that it refuses to learn from its mistakes.
Scotius
This kind of thing just makes me want to scream “We didn’t win the Cold War because we were better at torture than the Stasi and KGB!” I mean, why the fuck do they think so many East Germans were willing to do anything possible to get out? This is the kind of crap that would have done the Stasi proud. We’re really going to win some hearts and minds now.
Dave C
@Mandalay:
If one simply doesn’t acknowledge that one has made any mistakes, it certainly can be hard learn from them, can’t it?
Mandalay
Uh-oh, the most-hated-man-in-America just got fired as well:
Gex
@Mandalay: PC liebruls, squashing a real American’s free speech rights as usual!
askew
@Yutsano:
So, they should just open the cells in Guatanamo Bay and let them go? The problem is there is no one who will take a lot of these people and Congress won’t let them come to the U.S. I don’t think letting them wander around GB with no where to go is a solution.
Mandalay
From the FP link:
Our tax dollars at work.
If you put that line in a movie it would be derided as implausible nonsense.
Hill Dweller
@askew: Some of the prisoners have been cleared for release, but the House wingnuts put in all those crazy restrictions on transferring prisoners in the Defense Appropriations bill.
Also too, as you pointed out, a lot of countries are refusing to take them.
Gian
appears another gun death.
suicide
music biz, country music, Mindy McCready
37 years old, little kids.
If only there were moar gunz in the house she might’ve changed her mind while figuring out which one to use, right?
askew
@Hill Dweller:
It wasn’t just the wingnuts who made this mess. Congress voted overwhelmingly right after Obama’s inauguration to refuse to fund the transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Progressive heroes Feingold and Sanders voted against moving the prisoners. Had that not passed, Guantanamo would be closed by now. Funny how white progressives seem to gloss over their heroes bad votes and place 100% of the blame on Obama.
In reality, W left this mess for Obama to clean-up. The only real option is moving the prisoners they can to the US (if Congress ever grants money to do so); giving prisoners to other countries; and waiting for the prisoners to die. That’s what will happen with all of them unfortunately.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Say what now?
The prophet Nostradumbass
It’s interesting how some people, when they read stuff like this, immediately wonder how the Black posters here will respond. They only support Obama because he’s Black, I’m sure.
Yutsano
@askew: They are citizens of their respective countries. They should be returned to their country of citizenship. Then their governments can figure out what to do with them. We just gave up the right to police the world, we might as well do one last selfless act.
@CT:
ORLY?? Having trouble seeing out of your white hood?
Hill Dweller
@askew: Yes, the liberals voted to block Obama from bringing prisoners into the US, but I’m talking about all the crazy restrictions the wingnuts put in place once Boehner became Speaker.
As an aside, I read where Obama’s team spent nearly a year combing various government agencies/departments trying to find enough evidence just to start a file on some of the prisoners.
Guantanamo is a complete disaster.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Yutsano: Alex appears to have the same problem.
amk
@askew: Yup, the house and senate cowards from left and right acted in the most bipartisan manner on that vote.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Mandalay:
Uh-oh, the most-hated-man-in-America just got fired as well:
A man charged with slapping a toddler on a plane is apparently jobless, according to a statement by his former employer on Sunday.
It’ll be interesting to see how he spins it on his resume:
“After initiating a spontaneous outreach program to minority youth, I raised my employer’s national media profile 2200%…”
Who am I kidding? He’ll probably get a job at Fox News complaining about being a victim of PC gone wild.
John.Ty
@CT: You forgot ‘straight’.
Bob In Portland
JFK was right about tearing the CIA into a thousand pieces. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to do it.
Joey Maloney
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: Please stop by the white courtesy modem to claim your internets.
danah gaz
LOL, so ummm… I’ve been reading a few tumblrs on gender, and queer theory, largely centering around deconstructing the gender binary, and replacing it with something better… etc.
And my s/o went to the store a while ago and came back with those hilariously gendered BIC “for her” pens., I guess just to mess with me. =)
I nearly peed myself. I thought they had been embarrassed into recalling those.
dp
It never ceases to amaze me that those who are charged with upholding the rules of our self-governance have so little faith in the efficacy of those rules.
dollared
@amk: What Congress did: make it hard to close Guantanamo. They have nothing to do with 1) seizing prisoners’ attorney-client privileged documents while at trial; 2) lie about it on the stand.
There is no justification for this. And only Obama is to blame. Because it is his government to run. And these violations of basic rights are simple executive decisions that are ultimately answerable to Obama.
Mino
@PeakVT: They are practicing for wider application. I see that ICE is adapting measures already.
the farmer
Leaving “confidential” legal documents laying around in bins in jail cells? Who’s the genius lawyer who thought that one up?
*
Ruckus
@PeakVT:
…is the government just going through the motions for PR purposes?
Dog I hope not.
If they are, then can we conclude that they are horrible at PR?
Fred
If they gave these guys real trials they might actually get some real convictions. As it is whatever “convictions” they get will be dismissed in the court of world oppinion, if not in actual courts of law.
PeakVT
@Scamp Dog: It’s mostly about lying to ourselves at this point, isn’t it?
SRW1
We’re just making sure that they really hate us for our freedoms.
Xenos
@danah gaz: Bic is French. Trying to get them to think in a non-gendered way is pointless.
Xenos
@Ultraviolet Thunder: There are only a few Euro-located expats catching the early / late threads. It gets a bit weird to be drinking coffee at 6:00 CET and watching people argue themselves to exhaustion. Then you get people like Yutsano who apparantly do not need to sleep.
jeffreyw
fywp
JPL
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: Since Joe was the President of a subsidiary, they probably asked him to resign with a nice package. Their statement simply says he is no longer employed at the company.
gene108
GITMO being open is beyond Obama’s control.
Making sure the military tribunals don’t behave like asshats should be in his control as Commander-in-Chief.
I hope the folks, who did this get booted out of the military (but I’m not holding my breath).
Keith G
@dollared: As the very tired internet cliche goes…
This 100%
Just because the Obama administration is stuck with the shit sandwich of holding these prisoners does not mean that they have to continue to munch on said repast with such vigor.
BTW if some are indeed cleared for release (as in no point for still jailing them), but they are willfully still held and subjected to abuse…when does this become an actionable human rights abuse? When does, “I was just following orders” no longer function as an excuse?
It seems to me that there very well may be a day in our future when we will have strong reason to wish that this president had been a stalwart for civil liberties.
mai naem
@askew: I think they should release them to the Saudis and let them deal with them. Saudi Arabia is the root of this crap with their Wahabism and their funding of Madrassas etc. to distract stupid Muslims from the problems caused by the Saudi royals. Kind of like what the GOP/Koch brothers does with stupid rednecks in this country pushing their freedumb, low/no taxes and the evil of the ghey garbage.
magurakurin
@Fred:
They tried. The Administration wanted to send them to a prison in Illinois and try them in Federal Court. Congress denied the 80 million requested and passed a law that made it illegal for them to be transferred to the US.
As for the world caring: I doubt the world will care. From a pretty fair article at the Huff Post
It’s a cluster fuck that might not ever be solved, but it really doesn’t seem that there is much good-will in the world at large for the 166 who remain. I kinda doubt that very many tears will be shed for them. Maybe that’s wrong, but it does seem to be true.
Nobody else is going to be sent there. A few more handfuls will probably eventual be sent somewhere else, but a couple of platoons worth of those guys are probably going to die there.
But, by all means, lets blame Obama.
Baud
Apparently, we are all John McCain when it comes to Obama.
Hsquared
THEY’RE IN PRISON!!!!!!
What the hell are confidential legal docs doing in a prison cell where there’s NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY?!?!?!?!?
arguingwithsignposts
Is this some kind of honeypot post? or just a Pavlovian experiment?
Lost
That virulently liberal news organization, NPR, was covering this this morning.
max
@gene108:GITMO being open is beyond Obama’s control.
At this point.
Making sure the military tribunals don’t behave like asshats should be in his control as Commander-in-Chief.
Several layers of bureaucracy are involved, making it difficult to simply reach down and do things. And several layers of bureaucracy are involved on the items which gets the attention of the President (any president). Which doesn’t mean he can’t do *anything*.
I hope the folks, who did this get booted out of the military (but I’m not holding my breath).
Brutality to prisoners is only a firing offense in any of our various penal systems if it’s egregious. Simple (if very very wrong) violations of rights are never a firing offenses for anybody including prosecutors.
Combine that with the fact that a lot of the military are indoctrinated into Republican attitudes and none of this is a surprise.
Baud: Apparently, we are all John McCain when it comes to Obama.
Should be ‘…Obama’s DOJ’.
Keith G: It seems to me that there very well may be a day in our future when we will have strong reason to wish that this president had been a stalwart for civil liberties.
A thousand days or so and counting now, actually.
At any rate, I hope that they have lots of eucalyptus down there for the koalas.
max
[‘With that many fucking kangaroos running around there have to be some koalas around.’]
Nunca el Jefe
@Yutsano: pretty sure ct’s comment was snark. Maybe get some coffee, then read it again.
Barry
@FlipYrWhig: “Good thing Germany has always had a sterling record of abiding by values like justice and liberty!”
They’ve had regime change – have we?
Kay
@Alex:
No, Ralph Nader really is full of shit on the minimum wage. We’ve successfully raised it at the state level for years. Year in, year out, constant battle. It’s popular. It actually drove up turn out for Democrats in 2006, which was widely reported at the time. It was the “secret weapon”.
The successful coalition in 2006 was labor, the Democratic Party and social justice religious groups.
I laughed out loud when I read he said he had “put calls in” to Pelosi and Reid. Woo hoo. Way to have “skin in the game” there, Ralph. I must have missed when he stood outside to get signatures on all those ballot petitions in 2005 :)
I think he was a great lawyer, I think he invented the whole segment of “consumer protection law” so should absolutely be credited with that, but I also think he’s a net negative now, if one actually hopes to succeed at something.
The Green Party are an absolute fucking disaster on voting rights, for example. Just this past cycle they brought a lawsuit based on a stupid internet conspiracy theory that (had it succeeded) would have destroyed all the work voting rights people had put into Ohio for months. Luckily, they lose constantly, so it didn’t affect the outcome.
The minimum wage fight is complicated. It’s long. Reducing it to a rant on Obama and the Democrats doesn’t do it justice. I get that he’s angry at Obama and the Democrats, but he should be able to put that aside if he seeks to be a competent and effective advocate for the minimum wage.
Keith G
@magurakurin: As I recall, there were ships carrying loads of European refugees (Jews as I recall) that the world cared nothing about. Now we wish we did.
Caring for the basic humanity of even those who are hated and vilified is the mark of a just people.
@arguingwithsignposts: To be honest, I am not a fan of responses such as this.
Yes, it is possible that we get quickly into the weeds of silliness, but that does not detract from this being a very important topic that needs to be examined, however tenuous the grasp on maturity such a discussion holds.
I want my society and my government to be just. Tolerated incidental injustice will spread. It always has.
Horatius
@Bob In Portland: I wonder why.
Viva BrisVegas
Anybody been keeping up with the story of Ben Zygier, aka “Prisoner X”?
Zygier was a dual Australian/Israeli citizen, who in early 2010 was disappeared into a cell at Ayalon Prison specially built for Yigal Amir. His presence in gaol was kept secret by a government gag order.
The story so far suggests that he was a Mossad agent who used his Australian passport to travel to Arab countries.
It is also suggested that shortly before being arrested, he made contact with Australian intelligence and was about to spill the beans on the illegal use of Australian passports by Mossad.
About 10 months after his arrest he was found hanged in his cell, despite being under constant surveillance. He was buried in Melbourne, leaving behind a wife and two kids.
I recommend you look up the details, it’s a story worthy of le Carre.
It just goes to show that Gitmo is not so much a place, as a state of mind.
MomSense
@Kay:
It is also ironic given that many of us who either worked for Ralph Nader or one of the organizations he founded–left sick, impoverished and completely disillusioned.
The business model (that made him incredibly wealthy) was to pay young, idealist kids poverty level wages for jobs which require ridiculously long hours, give shitty benefits, treat you like crap, and spit you out when you either have had enough or your family steps in and has an intervention.
He really needs to STFUNOW
arguingwithsignposts
@Keith G: To be honest, I have no fucks to give as to whether you are not a fan.
I’m appalled by Gitmo and bullshit like this that goes on. I’m not going to compare Obama to Hitler over it, and if you look at most of this thread, the hair-on-fire to civil discussion ratio is laughable. People coming here to tell us why they took BJ out of their bookmarks, ferchrissake.
It’s tiresome.
Kay
@MomSense:
I’m sorry to hear that. I actually read a lot about him in law school, almost by accident. He really did invent consumer protection law. The whole concept. So, that’s an incredibly important contribution, the idea that normal people can demand certain standards from products and services.
It’s just frustrating to read him on labor issues because he’s stuck in 1992 or something. The minimum wage fight WAY preceded OWS, and labor have done a huge push for low wage workers beginning in, I don’t know, 2004? We just saw huge international protests re: Wal Mart. It didn’t get that much press coverage, but it was really big. Does he follow any of this stuff? One starts to think he’s not all that interested in it, if he’s not even following it.
I never thought Obama could single-handedly raise the federal minimum wage. I wanted him to say it at the SOTU because then it becomes a national debate. I thought the timing was good, actually, for his advocate role. Media have (finally) gone to WAGE inequality, instead of talking about taxes constantly and exclusively. GOOD timing.
Cassidy
Man, I go to bed and miss fire agents shutting in themselves and tedbeatshellen drunk posting. Damn.
Anya
The blame for the travesty that’s Guantanamo prison should be put at the feet of the congress. They overwhelmingly voted to block it’s closure, and then abdicated their oversight responsibility. However, making sure that the Military Tribunals do not operate like a lawless fiefdom is the responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief.
People who authorized this should be charged and given a dishonorable discharge.
Omnes Omnibus
@the farmer: Actually, prisoners have legal legal documents in there cells all the time. I an attorney writes a letter to his or her client or brings a memo in for the client to read, where do you think it will be kept? In regular jails and prisons, there are strict rules about what guards can and cannot touch and attorney-client communications are cannot be touched. It isn’t a dumb thing on the part of the prisoners at all. The government is entirely in the wrong on this.
Hunter
I’m reminded of a comment an attorney friend of mine made when she worked in the Rights and Reproductions department of a major Hollywood studio: “My job is to figure out what we can get away with.”
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Omnes Omnibus
@askew:
The facts that W’s admin created Gitmo and the tribunals and that Congress won’t let Obama end them are no justification for what just happened. Sure, it is a bad situation, but there is no need to make it worse.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed.
@Anya:
Quite right, which is also why I think we need to keep such things in mind when we talk about fixing the laws around drones and targeted assassinations. If this Congress makes those laws, we could well end up with a worse and less fixable legal regime than what we have now. Yes, there are things that shouldn’t be subject to the discretion and conscience of the executive alone. But making them subject to this Congress is probably not an improvement.
burnspbesq
@askew:
Not funny at all. It’s a necessary psychological defense mechanism if you’re going to persist in believing things that are manifestly untrue.
taylormattd
DAMN YOU OBAMA
taylormattd
So what is the point of this post?
Are you saying there are a bunch of people who post on left blogs who were claiming Guantanamo was lovely, and that until this NBC report, the true firebagging heroes at FDL were the only people bravely reporting Guantanamo sucked?
Keith G
@arguingwithsignposts: Nice out burst. You are the first to bring up the Austrian painter and quite frankly the static to signal ratio seems a bit lower than for some other topics. There seems to be a bit of snark and two or three who are just being irritable. That’s a good day the inter webs.
Look, of course there are always silly people posting outrageous things.
That does not force the rest to give up the ability to have a much need discourse over a very important issue.
Maybe someday you will come upon a few fucks to claim for your very own.
taylormattd
@Keith G: If you want to be pissed at someone for sullying the discussion of an important topic, perhaps you should direct your ire at Ms. Laurie, who (when she’s not busy reposting verbatim 7 paragraphs of Professor Krugman, followed by the sentence “what’s on the agenda for today?”) never misses an opportunity to throw a bone to the racist psychopath PUMAs at FDL.
burnspbesq
@the farmer:
Dumbass, tell me how many jail cells you’ve been in that have lockable file cabinets.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The government can’t have it both ways. You can’t make it impossible to secure privileged materials and then claim that the defendant didn’t make a reasonable effort to secure privileged materials.
burnspbesq
@dollared:
Just out of idle curiosity, have you ever worked in an organization with more than three people. Because you have some peculiar notions about span of control.
Nutella
And then the camp’s top legal adviser was charged with perjury.
Right?
? Martin
@burnspbesq:
What? These guys don’t have asses? Clearly they didn’t try hard enough to secure that stuff.