SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus

[Troubleshooter]

Just send them all back to their "home countries."

Truth and the Gitmo Detainees

Is every prisoner at Guantanamo really a terrorist?

Steve Chapman | July 7, 2008

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

The case involved Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Muslim who fled to Afghanistan in May 2001 to escape persecution of his Uighur ethnic group by the Beijing government. When the U.S. invaded after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Uighur camp where he lived was destroyed by air strikes. He and his compatriots made their way to Pakistan, where villagers handed them over to the government, which transferred them to American custody.

You might think you would have to do something pretty obvious to wind up in Guantanamo. Apparently not. The U.S. government does not claim Parhat was a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. He was not captured on a battlefield. The government's own military commission admitted it found no evidence that he "committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition partners."

So why did the Pentagon insist on holding him as an enemy combatant? Because he was affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a separatist Muslim group fighting for independence from Beijing. It had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks but reputedly got help from al-Qaida.

But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after reviewing secret documents submitted by the government, found that there was no real evidence. It said the flimsy case mounted against Parhat "comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true." And it ruled that, based on the information available, he was not an enemy combatant even under the Pentagon's own definition of the term.

Is this verdict just another act of judicial activism by arrogant liberals on the bench? Not by a long shot.

Of the three judges who signed the opinion, one, Thomas Griffith, was appointed in 2005 by President Bush himself. Another, David Sentelle, was nominated in 1985 by President Reagan—and had earlier joined in ruling that the Guantanamo detainees could not go to federal court to assert their innocence (a decision the Supreme Court overturned).

The administration could hardly have asked for a more accommodating group of judges. Yet they found in favor of the detainee on the simple grounds that if the government is going to imprison someone as an enemy combatant, it needs some evidence that he is one.

Parhat may not be an exceptional case. Most of the prisoners were not captured by the U.S. in combat but were turned over by local forces, often in exchange for a bounty. We had to take someone else's word that they were bad guys.

A 2006 report by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux found that only 8 percent of those held at Guantanamo were al-Qaida fighters. Even a study done at West Point concluded that just 73 percent of the detainees were a "demonstrated threat"—which means 27 percent were not.

The Parhat case doesn't prove that everyone in detention at Guantanamo is an innocent victim of some misunderstanding. But it does show the dangers of trusting the administration—any administration—to act as judge, jury, and jailer. It illustrates the need for an independent review to make sure there is some reason to believe the people being treated as terrorists really deserve it.

If any particular detainees are as bad as the administration claims, it should have no trouble making that case in court. But there is nothing to be gained from the indefinite imprisonment of someone whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Keeping innocent people behind bars is a tragedy for them and a waste for us.

[TheMercenary]

Send them home.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

snip~ Parhat may not be an exceptional case. Most of the prisoners were not captured by the U.S. in combat but were turned over by local forces, often in exchange for a bounty. We had to take someone else's word that they were bad guys. ~snip

Because Bush&Co decided that the Afghanistan war against the Taliban would be carried out by local warlords, with US support, the warlords' forces did most of the capturing Taliban/illegal combatants.
Now I know not all the detainees came that way, but that would explain why the majority were not captured by US soldiers.

[Undertoad]

I asked for a cite that torture occurred at Guantanamo. You quoted my request and then wrote a long post that does not contain a cite.

[dar512]

wiki

Then search for the word torture.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I asked for a cite that torture occurred at Guantanamo. You quoted my request and then wrote a long post that does not contain a cite.

We are well beyond needing citations for torture. Documents now define approval for torture in the White House. Recent revelations report that the CIA was so concerned about their own safety for doing torture as to demand written documents from the White House that approved it.

Current questions are specifically who authorized torture. For example, currently under investigation is AG Gonzales. You can argue these silly needs for citations all you want. At this point, America tortured prisoners in Guantanamo. The recently discovered documents from the CIA state that the White House authorized it in writing. Question now is who in the White House authorized it.

What is just a few rogue plumbers bugging the Watergate? Investigators are now asking the same questions about torture in Guantanamo - and elsewhere.

Bad enough we tortured them, kept them in solitary confinement, denied them due process, and even refused to let the Red Cross tell their families where they were. Worse - hundreds (probably all but maybe 16) were completely innocent. This is the moral and religous George Jr? Torture of innocent people happens when only god tells a leader what to do. A damning reality.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by tw

Current questions are specifically who authorized torture. For example, currently under investigation is AG Gonzales. You can argue these silly needs for citations all you want. At this point, America tortured prisoners in Guantanamo.

So you can't site it. Ok.

[dar512]

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchas...nce-may-be.php

http://talkradionews.com/2008/07/wat...in-guantanamo/

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/refere...es&match=exact

http://cbs5.com/national/hearing.wat....2.563973.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0...-_n_87082.html

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...y_deprivation/

[dar512]

While you may have doubts that Guantanamo prisoners have been waterboarded, there is no doubt that prisoners have been tortured.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007...guantanamo.usa

I don't get the defense of this behavior. If it's legal to do against POWs how soon will we see it used against citizens? How soon will a citizen be declared a POW so that torture can be used?

One of the objectives of the law is to prohibit abuses of power. This is the sort of thing that should be specifically prohibited.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I asked for a cite that torture occurred at Guantanamo. You quoted my request and then wrote a long post that does not contain a cite.

I wanted to be clear if I needed to find only waterboarding or if you agreed that the other methods are also torture.
How about the New York Times? It appears we took examples of torture that our military was being taught to withstand and turned it into a "howto" guide.

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

[Undertoad]

OK. There are a few pretty damning things in there, especially regarding the treatment of the suspected 20th hijacker.

The section that claims Cheney admitted waterboarding at the facility was wrong, and I have edited that and removed it. (I know, I know!) The article that they cited was missing, but I found the same article on Common Dreams. Cheney admitted that waterboarding was used, but not that it was used at Guantanamo. The CIA later admitted it too, but the subjects were not at Guantanamo. And none of the prisoners mention it, and the Red Cross doesn't mention it. I cannot connect Guantanamo and waterboarding.

Also, though there are some prisoner complaints of sleep deprivation (and it might be the only thing the prisoner complaints have in common), nobody said sleep deprivation "over a period of years". People just seem to make stuff up sometimes.

[Undertoad]

Yeah also the FBI Freedom of Information document is chock full of "class B" stuff during interrogations.

(but also, no waterboarding mentioned)

[TheMercenary]

eh. not completely heart broken.

[TheMercenary]

Well the first link says nothing about waterboarding at GITMO. After that, none of the links are original source documents. I disregard anything written by the Huffington post. So where is the proof that it happened at GITMO. The liberal press have long used a broad definition of "torture" which is not supported by the facts.

[TheMercenary]

I respect your opinion but we disagree on much. You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes and you are only fed your information from the liberal left-wing web sites. The reality as you see it is not what it seems. You can discount me and ignore my statements as you see fit. I have no problem with it nor do I think you are a lesser person because of it. But give me the same respect.