AP: Dozens Of Gitmo Detainees Getting Day In Court - "Evidentiary Record Is Surprisingly Bare"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/ap/after-years-of-waiting-dozens-of-guantanamo-detainees-are-getting-their-day-in-court-70140672.html

Dozens of Guantanamo detainees are getting their day in court
By: PETE YOST
Associated Press
11/15/09 10:28 PM EST

WASHINGTON — In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba. Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse here are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government's evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners.

Scooped up along with hard-core terrorist suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, these 30 detainees stand in stark contrast to the 10 prisoners whom the Obama administration targeted for prosecution Friday for plotting the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of 9/11, and four of his alleged henchmen are headed for a federal civilian trial in New York; five others, including a top suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission. More detainees are expected to soon be added to the prosecution list. But there will still be plenty of cases left among the 215 detainees now at Guantanamo to keep the judges here busy as they work to clear a legal morass the Bush administration created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once promised Guantanamo held "the worst of the worst." The judges here have rejected pleas for release from eight detainees, but they have concluded the government doesn't even have enough evidence to keep 30 other detainees behind bars. "There is absolutely no reason for this court to presume that the facts contained in the government's exhibits are accurate," District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote in ordering the release of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. He was repatriated to Yemen after a seven-year stay at Guantanamo, where he was brought as a teenager.

"Much of the factual material contained in those exhibits is hotly contested for a host of different reasons ranging from the fact that it contains second- and third-hand hearsay to allegations that it was obtained by torture to the fact that no statement purports to be a verbatim account of what was said," Kessler said. She ruled the government failed to prove the detainee was part of or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaida forces.

The evidentiary record "is surprisingly bare," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in ordering the release of Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah, a 50-year-old father of four from Kuwait who had been an aviation engineer for Kuwaiti Airways for 20 years. He has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since 2002.

MORE AT LINK

[Solly Mack]

1. "Surprisingly"

Snort.


K&R

[EFerrari]

2. Surprise to whom? We've known they are bakers and tourists

and grandfathers and goat herders for f#cking years, all sold to us for Rumsfeld's terra parade.

ETA: of all the fucked up things BushCo did in the last 8 years, this and Katrina makes me the angriest. That we couldn't overturn two stolen elections was bad. But not overturning two stolen elections and watching innocent people be tortured and watching the Gulf Coast left to drown was even worse.

[chill_wind]

3. You both beat me to it.

K & R.

[Hissyspit]

4. Newsweek was one who broke many of their identities

and yet most Americans have no idea.

[EFerrari]

10. I like Jon Meacham. He's one of the very last print guys

that I have a great deal of affection for.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. K&R n/t

[annabanana]

6. That Rumsfeld, Yoo, Cheney, Rice et al are blithely flitting around

free is infuriating.

[wuvuj]

7. A SANE policy on terrorism....

Read it ALL at.....

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/11/security-theater



Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.

Terrorism has always been rare, and for all we've heard about 9/11 changing the world, it's still rare. Even 9/11 failed to kill as many people as automobiles do in the US every single month. But there's a pervasive myth that terrorism is easy. It's easy to imagine terrorist plots, both large-scale "poison the food supply" and small-scale "10 guys with guns and cars." Movies and television bolster this myth, so many people are surprised that there have been so few attacks in Western cities since 9/11. Certainly intelligence and investigation successes have made it harder, but mostly it's because terrorist attacks are actually hard. It's hard to find willing recruits, to co-ordinate plans, and to execute those plans -- and it's easy to make mistakes.

Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we're psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we've embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life -- all of this plays into the hands of terrorists. We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.

.....

Of course this means the cops and military would have to give up all their recently gained power and importance....? What! No adrenaline rush? No police state?

Would need to shut down the perpetual wars? Both foreign and domestic?

The first...primary...and most obnoxious form of "terrorism" is that pushed by the powers that be (stupid?)? All other terrorism is blowback and reactionary.

[wuvuj]

8. The ROOTS of terrorisrm....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23971.htm


You might think we would have learned from Vietnam, Iraq, the "Black Hawk down" incident in Somalia back in 1993, and other such forays, that military responses seldom discourage insurgencies. In fact, they often do the opposite; foreign intervention is likely to infuriate local populations, motivate them to support the rebels, and result in an escalation of resistance activities. That was the way it happened during the American Revolution, Latin America's wars for independence from Spain, and in colonial Africa, Indochina, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and so many other places.

Blaming pirates and other desperate people for our problems is a distraction we cannot afford if we truly want to find a solution to the crises confronting us. These incidents are symptoms of our failed economic model. They are to our society the equivalent of a heart attack to an individual. We send in Navy Seals to rescue the hostages, as we would hire doctors to perform a coronary artery bypass. But it is essential to admit that both are reactions to an underlying problem. The patient needs to address the reasons his or her heart failed in the first place, such as smoking, diet, and lack of exercise. The same is true for piracy and all forms of terrorism.

Our children's futures are interlocked with the futures of children born in the fishing villages of Somalia, the mountains of Burma (Myanmar), and the jungles of Colombia. When we forget that fact, when we see those children as remote, as somehow disconnected from our lives, as merely the offspring of pirates, guerrillas, or drug runners, we point the gun at our own progeny as well as at the desperate fathers and mothers in lands that seem so far away but in reality are our next door neighbors.

Every time I read about the actions we take to protect ourselves from so-called terrorists, I have to wonder at the narrow-mindedness of our strategy. Although I have met such people in Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, and Nicaragua, I have never met one who wanted to take up a gun. I know there are crazed men and women who kill because they cannot stop themselves, serial killers, and mass-murderers. I am certain that members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other such groups are driven by fanaticism, but such extremists are able to recruit sizable numbers of followers only from populations that feel oppressed or destitute. The "terrorists" I have found in Andean caves and desert villages are people whose families were forced off their farms by oil companies, hydroelectric dams, or "free trade" agreements, whose children are starving, and who want nothing more than to return to their families with food, seeds, and deeds to lands they can cultivate.

[sam sarrha]

9. probably 95% were turned in for the money or cause someone wanted another guys property, sell his

wife and kids into sex slavery... get rich quick. a lot of grudges got solved with Gitmo