The travesty of Gitmo -- even worse, now that they have real bad guys

[fuji]

So the 9/11 trials have begun, this time with some people who very clearly ARE real bad guys. But they are running them through the same farcical kangaroo court that they ran Khadr through. What are they thinking?

What do the Americans hope to accomplish here, besides harming their own interests?

Much of the damage has already been done. They've tortured these guys repeatedly, apaprently, 183 times in the case of one of them. I think even those who would make the "ticking bomb" argument for torture would have a hard time justifying torturing someone on 183 separate occasions. That just says that the fundamental practices at work there are corrupt and unethical.

What's going to happen here? Is it even remotely possible these guys will be found innocent? You could run them through a court with the highest standard of protection for the accused anywhere, and they would still be guilty as sin. Some of them have boasted about it before. There isn't any question about their guilt. Given they're being tried by a kangaroo court the outcome is an absolute certainty.

Except, of course, the questions raised by the process they're being run through. The very process itself will allow those who are opposed to the United States and to democracy to raise fundamental questions, to take the moral high ground, to claim to have been wronged. Gitmo will stand for everything that is wrong with the United States and with the West. It will become a symbol of Western corruption and Western oppression.

Now that they've got real bad guys on trial it's an even bigger catastrophe than when they were abusing Khadr.

Idiots.

 

[Aardvark154]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKOYyLfXHzE

(Second line)

 

[rld]

So the 9/11 trials have begun, this time with some people who very clearly ARE real bad guys. But they are running them through the same farcical kangaroo court that they ran Khadr through. What are they thinking?

What do the Americans hope to accomplish here, besides harming their own interests?

Much of the damage has already been done. They've tortured these guys repeatedly, apaprently, 183 times in the case of one of them. I think even those who would make the "ticking bomb" argument for torture would have a hard time justifying torturing someone on 183 separate occasions. That just says that the fundamental practices at work there are corrupt and unethical.

What's going to happen here? Is it even remotely possible these guys will be found innocent? You could run them through a court with the highest standard of protection for the accused anywhere, and they would still be guilty as sin. Some of them have boasted about it before. There isn't any question about their guilt. Given they're being tried by a kangaroo court the outcome is an absolute certainty.

Except, of course, the questions raised by the process they're being run through. The very process itself will allow those who are opposed to the United States and to democracy to raise fundamental questions, to take the moral high ground, to claim to have been wronged. Gitmo will stand for everything that is wrong with the United States and with the West. It will become a symbol of Western corruption and Western oppression.

Now that they've got real bad guys on trial it's an even bigger catastrophe than when they were abusing Khadr.

Idiots.

Why do you accept the unsubstantiated allegations of a Islamic fanaticist who is dedicated to killing innocent people on the number of incidents of torture?

And even if he was tortured 1,000 times but was still guilty, does that mean he should go free?

 

[fuji]

Why do you accept the unsubstantiated allegations of a Islamic fanaticist who is dedicated to killing innocent people on the number of incidents of torture?

The number of incidents of torture do not come from the Islamic fanaticist. That information comes from a CIA memo that was leaked to the media:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html

I love your use of the word "unsubstantiated" in the context of a kangaroo court. Exactly how should this information be substantiated? It would be FANFUCKINGTASTIC if we had a process running that could credibly substantiate anything here. The victims of 9/11 deserve that.

And even if he was tortured 1,000 times but was still guilty, does that mean he should go free?

That's a difficult question, and quite a Hobson's choice. Let me start out by saying that I have no doubt whatsoever that had they been handed over to a proper US court upon their arrest, that a free and open court process with an ordinary jury running under the ordinary law would have had absolutely no problem convicting them and delivering either a sentence of life in prison, or death. That is what should have happened. It clearly could have happened. That it is now at risk is criminal, and those responsible for putting it at risk should be brought to justice. There is no "enemy combatant" issue here, these are people responsible for murders, or conspiracy to commit murders, in New York.

According to many of our principles of justice, yes he should be released, which is painful and plainly we should do everything credible to avoid that happening. They should be put in front of a credible court ASAP, but honestly what's more important--putting this guy into the ground, or the strength of our democracy and the rule of law? Or more honestly, what's more important: Democracy, or justice for the 9/11 victims? What a shitty decision to have to make. Which leads to this point:

The most appropriate response to an attack on democracy is a demonstration of how well it works--and that has been jeopardized. There are a series of people working in the CIA and in the US military who have committed horrendous crimes completely contrary to everything that democracy stands for. That the crimes were committed against some very bad people in fact makes it even worse, given the importance of getting a conviction against the perpetrators of 9/11. I firmly believe that counter-terrorism should be treated as a policing action, and not as a national security issue. As such it's pretty important to me that we run a credible policing action against the people who did it--and that means convicting them through a credible process.

It's a travesty no matter how you look at it, it would appear that their callous disregard for the law has put fundamental justice at risk in probably the most important murder trial of the last 100 years. That is a fuckup of stupendous proportions. It really is.

If we are going to win the war on terror the outcome of the 9/11 trials HAS to be that these guys are going away, or executed, because they violated the rule of law, because they went against fundamental principles of decency and equality and democracy, because they committed crimes against their fellow human beings. Instead the perception will simply be that they are being killed because the US was stronger/bigger/more-powerful, that might makes right, and that the rule of law can be completely disregarded. That helps THEIR cause, not ours.

 

[groggy]

Why do you accept the unsubstantiated allegations of a Islamic fanaticist who is dedicated to killing innocent people on the number of incidents of torture?

And even if he was tortured 1,000 times but was still guilty, does that mean he should go free?

If he was tortured 1,000 times, or even 183 times, any confessions should be null and void.
But they form the backbone of the charges, from what I hear.

 

[fuji]

To be fair the prosecutors are now saying they will not use any evidence based on torture. Which is great, I imagine they do have all sorts of other evidence in this case. Still, there is no justification for keeping them out of the regular courts, where their trial and conviction would be beyond reproach.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Sadly this whole Gitmo charade was a brain fart concocted by Dubya & his DICK.
These goofs like MOST Cons always had a warped idea of what Law & Order entails!....

 

[John Galt 2012]

Better to torture those pos to get what we need than pass up on a chance to gather valuable data.


.

 

[nuprin001]

The primary laws governing POWs were written assuming all prisoners taken in war would be representative of a nation-state. The laws written afterwards to govern non-nation-state fighters taken in an act of war are, at the very very best, kludges. And in the end, the vast majority of those taken prisoner don't even qualify for protection under those laws.

To gain Geneva Convention protections as a non-nation-state fighter, a fighter must be under command of a central authority, may not conceal their allegiance, and must be identifiable before and during their attack. That central authority is responsible for seeing to it that the combatants it is responsible for do not engage in deliberate attacks on civilian, non-governmental targets.

Well, the only qualification for Geneva Convention protections that the enemy combatants in both Iraq and Afghanistan meet is "under central authority". And that's being generous to a ridiculous fault, given the decentralized nature of terrorist organizations.

It's how laws work: there are a set of qualifications and if you don't meet those qualifications you don't have the protection of those laws. An American who gets sick in Canada doesn't get the benefit of your free healthcare. They don't qualify. Someone who doesn't follow the "rules" of warfare don't get the protection of the law. They don't qualify. Those laws were written with a lot of assumptions that don't apply in this situation and they were written by nation-states that had a interest in making sure that nation-states had the advantage.

Was/is the US's blatant rules-lawyering of those rules, well, blatant? Absolutely. But technically the US was following the rules.

If the US government tortures and harms people within the US, that's a human rights violation according to various human rights treaties the US has signed.
If agents of Great Britain torture or harm people in a sovereign country, then that's either an act of war or a crime committed by those agents within that sovereign nation.
If military personnel of Canada deliberately torture or harm either enemy military personnel or non-combatants during a military operation, that is a war crime by the Geneva Conventions.

On the other hand, the laws were simply not written to cover agents of the US government, not acting on US soil but not acting in a sovereign country, and not acting against either recognized military personnel or non-combatants. BY THE LAW, the various insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan fall into a giant gray area in international law. That gray area exists both because of a blind spot of those who wrote the various treaties and (somewhat paradoxically) because those who wrote the laws wanted a gray area in those laws so they could deal with their own business.

 

[fuji]

These guys are charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the State of New York. This is not a case of "fighters" or "POWs" or "combatants". That is just spin, and, in fact, gives them more credit than they deserve, glamorizes their crime. It's murder they're guilty of. Plain, simple, murder. In fact, giving them a military trial props up the illusion that these terrorists want to maintain--that they are fighters, rather than just common criminals. The fact that there were nearly 3000 victims does not alter that. It's a well defined crime with lots of case law that has been well prosecuted many, many times in US courts. No matter whether they conspired to kill one person or thousands--it's murder. There is no need for any special procedure here.

Sorry but I just don't buy this line that terrorists are somehow special. They're not special. They're just murderers, common criminals, as despicable as any other serial killer, and they should be treated as such.

 

[nuprin001]

These guys are charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the State of New York. This is not a case of "fighters" or "POWs" or "combatants". That is just spin, and, in fact, gives them more credit than they deserve, glamorizes their crime. It's murder they're guilty of. Plain, simple, murder. The fact that there were nearly 3000 victims does not alter that. It's a well defined crime with lots of case law that has been well prosecuted many, many times in US courts. No matter whether they conspired to kill one person or thousands--it's murder. There is no need for any special procedure here.

Sorry but I just don't buy this line that terrorists are somehow special. They're not special. They're just murderers, and they should be treated as such.

That's because you're confusing criminal prosecution with gaining operational data.

From the POV of criminal prosecution, the point at which they were put in the custody of law enforcement officials is where their criminal detention began. That was not at Gitmo. At Gitmo, they were in the hands of military intelligence.

From the US perspective, those insurgents had two purposes: as sources of information and as criminals to be prosecuted for their crimes. Prosecuting for their crimes could wait: the data they had could not. In particular because once they were in the criminal justice system, they had the protection of the law. Between the time they were captured and the time they were handed over to law enforcement personnel, they had no legal status. They weren't non-combatants. They weren't POWs. They weren't recognized guerrilla fighters. They had no legal protection.

Gitmo wasn't about treating them as something special within the criminal justice system. It was about getting what was in their heads.

 

[fuji]

From the POV of criminal prosecution, the point at which they were put in the custody of law enforcement officials is where their criminal detention began. That was not at Gitmo. At Gitmo, they were in the hands of military intelligence.

I think you missed the memo. They are still at gitmo and the US is going to try them for murders committed in New York at gitmo under some specially concocted military commission that nobody really believes is going to give them a fair trial. That's unfortunate, because I think a regular US court following the ordinary rules would have no problem convicting them and handing down the harshest sentence.

That said, "gaining operational data" ought not to involve compromising the very values upon which democracies rest. If we go about torturing people in order to gain "operational data" then I think it's fair to ask on what grounds we believe our system is superior to theirs. Once you lower yourself to savagery, you lose the moral high ground. I'd rather suffer a few more terrorist attacks, than compromise on democracy, freedom, or the rule of law.

I also don't believe that any useful operational data was elicited from them under torture. The CIA has come under SO MUCH criticism for this, that if they had ever gotten anything useful out of torturing people, they would have leaked that by now, to salvage the CIA's reputation. Whatever operational data they had is so far out of date now, and so long ago acted on, that leaking it really wouldn't compromise anything. So, I think we can safely conclude that all that torturing accomplished nothing, other than that it put the legal case against them in jeopardy.

 

[rld]

If he was tortured 1,000 times, or even 183 times, any confessions should be null and void.
But they form the backbone of the charges, from what I hear.

I guess we are going to find out a) what evidence there is against them. b) all the details of how the confessions were obtained.

I suspect these chaps are not shy about claiming responsibility for their acts.

 

[rld]

I think you missed the memo. They are still at gitmo and the US is going to try them for murders committed in New York at gitmo under some specially concocted military commission that nobody really believes is going to give them a fair trial. That's unfortunate, because I think a regular US court following the ordinary rules would have no problem convicting them and handing down the harshest sentence.

That said, "gaining operational data" ought not to involve compromising the very values upon which democracies rest. If we go about torturing people in order to gain "operational data" then I think it's fair to ask on what grounds we believe our system is superior to theirs. Once you lower yourself to savagery, you lose the moral high ground. I'd rather suffer a few more terrorist attacks, than compromise on democracy, freedom, or the rule of law.

I also don't believe that any useful operational data was elicited from them under torture. The CIA has come under SO MUCH criticism for this, that if they had ever gotten anything useful out of torturing people, they would have leaked that by now, to salvage the CIA's reputation. Whatever operational data they had is so far out of date now, and so long ago acted on, that leaking it really wouldn't compromise anything. So, I think we can safely conclude that all that torturing accomplished nothing, other than that it put the legal case against them in jeopardy.

I have no idea of what quality of proceedings we will get at Gitmo, I will wait and see. But I am not surprised you are pre-judging the whole proceeding against them.

The best case outcome is that the evidence gained through torture is excluded and they are convicted anyways.

 

[fuji]

I have no idea of what quality of proceedings we will get at Gitmo

We know.

The best case outcome is that the evidence gained through torture is excluded and they are convicted anyways.

The best case outcome is they are moved to a real court and convicted there.

 

[Aardvark154]

If he was tortured 1,000 times, or even 183 times, any confessions should be null and void.
But they form the backbone of the charges, from what I hear.

Actually you are incorrect. They will not form any part of the evidence given the rules of procedure for the tribunals.

The best case outcome is that the evidence gained through torture is excluded and they are convicted anyways.

As mentioned above your first point is already the case, and I join with you as to your second point.

 

[fuji]

Torture is only one issue. A process is needed that guarantees them every single right of the accused that they would enjoy in a regular court. Not because I want to see them acquitted but because I want them to be found guilty in a convincing way, and because the principles here are worth much more than a few terrorists.

In fact, since their crime was committed in New York there is really no excuse not to try them there.

 

[train]

Sometimes the world just isn't a neat and tidy place where everything can be done to suit your sensibilities. It's just a guess but I would say that the US could give a fuck what you think and most are wondering why he didn't "commit suicide" while in incarceration.

My guess is that they know by now beyond any doubt( not reasonable doubt but ANY doubt) that these are the guys and this trial really is just for show so why waste your time with it ? Few people have enough time on their hands that they need a convincing show.

 

[fuji]

My guess is that they know by now beyond any doubt( not reasonable doubt but ANY doubt) that these are the guys and this trial really is just for show

Unlike you, I believe in democracy and the rule of law. Plainly, you have more of a "might makes right" outlook. We differ.

 

[dirk076]

The best outcome is to have Seal Team 6 deal with the cancer...Once and for all. Well either that or have Canada's peace keepers tell them to behave. LOL.

Oh sorry. I forgot they are taking the year off apparently.

Had Clinton dealt with the problem rather than being worried about getting his dick sucked during his time in the oval office, then 145 Canadians would not have had to die doing the heavy lifting in Afghanistan while you were over in Iraq looking for phantom WMD's. Smarmy fucker.