Message From Guantanamo: "America is Double Hetler in unjustice"

I direct your attention to the following article, dated June 3, 2009, by Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star:

Gitmo protest captured on film

WASHINGTON – A Guantanamo Bay detainee committed suicide late Monday just hours after two Chinese Muslim captives staged the detention centre's first public protest, increasing the pressure on U.S. President Barack Obama to outline his plan of how he will close the offshore prison.

Was it really a suicide? No details on which to base a judgment seem to be available, which is par for the course. And as for Obama and "pressure" to "outline his plan", that's not all the so-called "suicide" increases, but journalists can only say so much, even if they work in foreign countries.

Yemeni Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, 31, is the first prisoner to die since the White House changed hands four months ago. His suicide follows weeks of criticism from both ends of the political spectrum over the fate of the remaining 240 Guantanamo detainees.

News of the suicide was emailed to the media just as a flight bringing journalists from Guantanamo landed in Maryland.

Based on the track record of the organization sending that email, it might be best to refer to Muhammad Salih's death as a "so-called suicide", at least until further details emerge.

But I say this with two caveats, neither of which is likely to be satisfied, ever.

First, even if further details about Muhammad Salih's death do emerge, will they be credible? Probably not, especially if they are not corroborated. Will they be corroborated? Probably not, especially considering that detainees are being held at Guantanamo precisely to hide them, both from the media and from the protections normally afforded accused individuals under US and international law.

And second, how much is a man supposed to take? How much of the responsibility for Muhammad Salih's death must be laid at the feet of our government -- which held him for more than seven years, with no charge or trial or hearing, and no prospect of any of these in the near or distant future? -- which went to extreme lengths to deny him and all the other detainees any legal recourse or challenge, even though it never intended to charge them? -- which offered mountain tribesmen thousands of dollars apiece for any "terror suspects" they happened to capture, at the same time as innocent civilians were fleeing the bombing of their homes in Afghanistan?

Or to put it another way, given the scope and scale and ferocity of the forces arrayed in a deliberate and knowingly unjustified attempt to ruin the lives of Muhammad Salih and many others like him, how could his death be considered anything other than murder?

The press had been at the U.S. naval detention centre for the war crimes court hearing of Canadian Omar Khadr.

Khadr, 22, is accused of war crimes, including the murder of a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002.

And he's still in prison in Guantanamo despite two very inconvenient facts: that he was a child when he was captured, and that the "evidence" against him is clearly fabricated.

But then again, the same forces that ruined the life of Muhammad Salih are deployed against Omar Khadr, as they have been ever since ... since ...

Here's the big news! A protest! and information coming from detainees:

Hours after Khadr's brief hearing Monday, fewer than a dozen journalists on the trip, including a Toronto Star reporter, witnessed a rare unscripted moment on the base when two Uighur (pronounced Wee-gur) detainees managed to hold an impromptu protest.

The group was at an Oceanside prison known as "Camp Iguana," where 16 Uighur and one Algerian detainee are imprisoned.

As the journalists neared the fence line, the captives held up messages written in crayon on prison-issued sketch pads, knowing the Pentagon prohibits journalists from speaking to detainees.

For a few minutes they silently turned the pages quickly, as journalists shot video, photos and scribbled down their messages.

"We are being held in prison but we have been announced innocent a corrding to the virdict in caurt," one message said. "We need to freedom (sic)."

Most of the detainees currently held at Guantanamo are (or surely must be considered) innocent, either because they have been cleared of wrongdoing by a military court or because they have never been charged to begin with. And that's why

[a]nother stated, "America is Double Hetler in unjustice," seemingly comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis.

Seemingly? Seemingly?? What else could they possibly be talking about? They were obviously comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis. But then again, journalists can only say so much.

The Uighur prisoners with Chinese citizenship have been cleared for release but there's nowhere for them to go since the minority group is persecuted in its Communist-controlled homeland. The U.S. government has tried for months to find a country willing to provide the group asylum.

That's a laugh. It's a sick laugh, to be sure, but that's the only kind of laugh we get anymore.

The US government has spent years and years telling anyone who will still listen that these people are despicable terrorists, "the worst of the worst", and so on. Even now Dick Cheney is going around saying that if they are merely transferred to civilian prisons in the US, they will be plotting terrorist attacks against us from their cells. It's ludicrous, but that's what takes priority now according to the mainstream media. And reporters can only say so much ...

Reporters were ushered away from the fenced-in area shortly after the Uighurs had their written protest. One of the captives yelled as the gate was locked behind the group: "Is Obama Communist or a Democrat? We have the same operation in China."

Journalists were later forbidden from sending photos or video footage of the signs until Guantanamo officials received clearance from the White House – which didn't come until about 14 hours later.

No, truly. It's a free country. Always has been, always will be. Seriously.

But the best [read: worst] is yet to come:

Pentagon ground rules signed by reporters stipulate that images of detainees must be pre-screened and cannot identify the captives due to regulations in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the exploitation of prisoners of war.

Isn't that just rich?

A whole new category of mock-legal language was created, and the prison camp at Guantanamo was built, precisely in order to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and their prohibitions against the exploitation of prisoners of war.

And that's why Guantanamo detainees like Muhammad Salih are not normally called "prisoners", much less "prisoners of war". Instead they are called "enemy combatants" or "illegal enemy combatants" or simply "detainees".

Long, involved, and utterly cynical "legal" documents were created in order to give a semi-plausible veneer to some of the most blatant falsehoods of the terror war, documents whose existence has never been a secret, documents some of which have themselves been coming into the public eye recently: documents whose purpose appears to have been to deny these people "prisoner of war" status so that the protections mandated by the Geneva Conventions can be semi-plausibly described as not applicable to them -- and so that the Pentagon can ignore the Geneva Conventions in dealing with them.

So for the Pentagon to turn around and say that journalists cannot publish the names or faces of the captives, because to do so would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions...!

They don't even care anymore how transparent their lies are. They really couldn't care less whether or not you can see through their charade instantly. Is it because they have the big bucks, and the big weapons, and the big media, and the big politicians on their side, while we only have one another and the truth?

Back to the alleged suicide.

Hours after the protest guards found Salih unresponsive in his cell in a separate area of the prison and attempts to revive him failed.

We can be sure that the attempts to revive him were most vigorous, but what happened to Muhammad Salih in the hours before he was found unresponsive? And what happened to him in the years before that?

At least we know the answer to the latter question.

He had been held without charges at Guantanamo since February 2002 and appeared to have joined a lengthy hunger strike, according to medical records released in response to an Associated Press lawsuit.

How many years could you be held incommunicado, halfway across the world from your family, with no charges or evidence filed against you, no right to challenge your incarceration, and no prospect of ever obtaining your freedom, much less justice -- how many years of that could you take, even without any "enhanced interrogation techniques", before you decided it might be a good idea to stop eating?

Then again, a journalist can only say so much.

On the other hand, Michelle Shephard does manage to provide the photo above, and some very telling context:

Three detainee suicides in June 2006 under the George W. Bush administration drew international outrage, further fuelled by comments about the military's reaction.

"They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," then-Guantanamo commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr. said. "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

The psychopathy [*] on display here is striking, and perfectly fitting for a commander of a place such as Guantanamo.

They killed themselves -- and nobody else -- as an act of warfare against us!

We -- their oppressors: the people who held them in captivity for years, with no charges, no evidence, no due process and no hope -- are the victims of their deaths.

It doesn't get much more "Hetlerian" than that.

~~~

Psychopathy -- the personality disorder we see in the people-without-conscience who are variously called psychopathic, sociopathic, anti-social, and moral imbeciles -- comes in a variety of forms.

The most common psychopathic personality type is called "aggressive narcissism".

The following traits have been identified in a seminal work by Robert D. Hare as indicative of aggressive narcissism.

Read this list and try not to think of Harry Harris Jr., the former Guantanamo commander.

* Glibness/superficial charm
* Grandiose sense of self-worth
* Pathological lying
* Conning/manipulative
* Lack of remorse or guilt
* Shallow affect
* Callous/lack of empathy
* Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Read that list again and try not to think of the Pentagon, or the mainstream media, or the "leaders" of our mainstream political parties.

Read it one more time and try not to think of our long record of violent foreign intervention, or our history of slavery and racism, or the obliteration of the people who lived here before America was "discovered", and the utter contempt with which their cultures and their descendants have been treated ever since.

"Double Hetler in unjustice" may be spelled incorrectly, but it is seemingly an understatement.

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Torturing Democracy: A Documentary That Could Put Dick Cheney Out Of Our Misery

Torturing Democracy, an expose of how and why America came to be involved in open large-scale torture of prisoners (many of whom were simply shepherds captured by mountain tribesmen and sold into captivity), is now available for viewing online.

As Scott Horton reported last month, PBS can't find a time slot for this Frontline documentary until January 21, 2009 -- the day after Bush and Cheney are scheduled to leave office.

Horton has reported more recently that this documentary could help to provide "A Ticket to The Hague for Dick Cheney". Why? Because it has the power to change the minds of influential people in denial.

Horton explains:

Gene Burns is one of the nation’s most popular talk radio hosts. For years he has dismissed accounts of torture; America, he has said, does not torture. But last night, after watching Torturing Democracy and realizing that he had not understood how important and serious an issue torture had become, Burns abruptly changed his tune. Here’s a transcript of his remarks.

I now believe that some international human rights organization ought to open an investigation of the Bush Administration, I think focused on Vice President Dick Cheney, and attempt to bring charges against Cheney in the international court of justice at The Hague, for war crimes. Based on the manner in which we have treated prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the manner in which we have engaged in illegal rendition–that is, surreptitiously kidnapping prisoners and flying them to foreign countries where they could be tortured by foreign agents who do not follow the same civilized standards to which we subscribe.

I’ve always said that I’ve thought that even at Guantánamo Bay the United States was careful to stay on this side of torture. In fact, you may recall that on a couple of occasions we got into a spirited debate on this program about waterboarding, and whether waterboarding was torture. And I took the position that it was not torture, that it was simulated drowning, and that if that produced information which preserved our national security, I thought it was permissible.

And then I saw Torturing Democracy.

And I’m afraid, now that I have seen what I have seen, that I was wrong about that. It looks to me, based on this documentary, as if in fact we have engaged in behavior and practices at Guantánamo Bay, and in these illegal renditions, that are violations of the international human rights code.

And I believe that Dick Cheney is responsible. I believe that he was the agent of the United States government charged with developing the methodology used at Guantánamo Bay, supervising it for the administration, and indulging in practices which are in fact violations of human rights.

A large part of the population still credits the Bush Administration’s absurd claim that it never embraced or applied torture to detainees as a matter of policy. Two recent documentaries, Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (for which I was both a consultant and interviewee) and Sherry Jones’s PBS feature Torturing Democracy investigate the administration’s policies and conduct. Both draw from decision-makers inside the administration and soldiers on the frontline.

The administration did its best to spike both films. Taxi was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, but with Discovery Communications then in the process of going public and facing sensitive SEC clearances, executives apparently decided not to risk provoking the anger of the White House. As I reported elsewhere, PBS also found that it had no network space for Torturing Democracy until January 20, 2009 — the day the Bush Administration decamps from Washington.

Why was the administration so concerned about these two films? The conversion of Gene Burns supplies the answer. No one who sits through these films, I believe, will be able afterwards to accept the official version of events. George Bush has good reason to be afraid of too many Americans watching these documentaries.

George Bush is not the only one who has good reason to be afraid of too many Americans watching these documentaries. And that, in my opinion, is good incentive to watch them -- and to spread the word about them!

So here are those links again:
Torturing Democracy
Taxi to the Dark Side

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Multiple Meltdowns Simultaneously

In Iraq, "nervous negotiators" are trying to create an alternative pretext to "justify" the continuing war crime our "leaders" would prefer to describe as "liberation". And the Iraqis have "opened bidding" on contracts to develop the oil fields; these contracts were supposed to have been awarded on a no-bid basis to a handful of big American-multinationals, but the ungrateful Iraqis, still smarting from their liberation, nixed that bit of "political reconciliation".

Meanwhile, the "legal" proceedings at Gitmo have been revealed to be even more of a farce than we ever imagined, as

defense lawyers and human rights advocates charge that the fairness of the most significant proceeding at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is routinely undermined by incompetent interpretation.
...

The lawyers asked the court to order the government to produce an Arabic transcript of each hearing -- a motion military prosecutors are resisting.

And yet another Gitmo prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, has resigned in protest; saying key evidence was being withheld from the defense. We already knew "incriminating evidence" was being fabricated; so this is no surprise.

On the home front, it appears that yesterday's market upswing was not a harbinger of prosperity returning, but a reaction to Henry Paulson's announcement that the big banks will be allowed to dictate the terms of the agreement by which they steal more of our money than we even have.

And my favorite team is now on six-game losing streak. But at least their meltdown won't affect the future of humanity.

Seven Years of Bad Luck

Very superstitious

writings on the wall

Very superstitious
ladders 'bout to fall


Thirteen month old baby
broke the lookin' glass


Seven years of bad luck
the good things in your past


When you believe in things
that you don't understand
then you suffer


Superstition ain't the way


Very superstitious
wash your face and hands


Rid me of the problem
do all that you can


Keep me in a daydream
keep me goin' strong


You don't wanna save me
sad is my song


When you believe in things
that you don't understand
then you suffer


Superstition ain't the way


Very superstitious
nothin' more to say


Very superstitious
the devil's on his way


Thirteen month old baby
broke the lookin' glass


Seven years of bad luck
good things in your past


When you believe in things
that you don't understand


then you suffer


Superstition ain't the way
no, no, no, no, no

Stevie Wonder:

Hope This Is As Sick As It Gets, But Don't Count On It

Angela Levin for the UK's Daily Mail, with profound disgust (my emphasis):

Greetings from Guantanamo Bay ... and the sickest souvenir shop in the world

The sands are white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.

They have a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.

Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything wrong.

Welcome to "Taliban Towers" at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet.

As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world's most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for American sunseekers -- a revelation that has drawn international anger and condemnation.

Just yards from the shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys, nearly 300 "enemy combatants" lie sweltering in a waking nightmare.

It is six years since foreign prisoners, many captured in Afghanistan, were first taken to this US-occupied corner of Cuba. Yet even now, no charges have been brought against them.

While the detainees lie incarcerated, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The United States' 1.5 million service personnel and Guantanamo's 3,000 construction workers are eligible to visit the "resort", which boasts a McDonald's, KFC and a bowling alley.

They even have a Wal-Mart supermarket.

The vacation comes at a knock-down price: just $42 (£20) per night for a suite of air-conditioned rooms, including a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms.

But it is the souvenirs that have led to the greatest criticism. One T-shirt from the gift shop is decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."

Another praises "the proud protectors of freedom". A third displays a garish picture of an iguana and states: "Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun."

A child-sized shirt says: "Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

There are mugs inscribed with "kisses from Guantanamo" and "Honor Bound To Defend Freedom".

The Guantanamo holiday trade was exposed by Zachary Katznelson, a British-based human rights lawyer and spokesman for Reprieve, the group leading the international campaign against the camp.

"When I see the conditions the prisoners have to cope with and then think of the T-shirt slogans, I am appalled," he said. "To say I am repulsed is an understatement. Unbelievable as it may seem, the US authorities are proud of the 'souvenirs' and what they are doing."

Mr Katznelson represents 28 of the detainees and makes regular visits to the prison.

"The military keeps a tight hold on everything that is available in Guantanamo Bay and someone senior has given their approval for this disgusting nonsense," he said.

"Pretending that Guantanamo Bay is essentially a resort in the Caribbean is grossly offensive and the idea of relaxing in the sun while close by many individuals are robbed of their rights, tortured and abused is both repugnant and ridiculous."

His anger is shared by other human rights campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Guantanamo represents a shameful chapter in American history.

Amnesty International said: "These supposedly 'fun' souvenirs are in grotesquely bad taste and the fact that they are on sale at the camp quite frankly beggars belief."

There are currently 280 prisoners sweltering in cages in temperatures of up to 100F (38C). The camp, where 7,000 soldiers are stationed, was established in 2002 following the invasion of Afghanistan.

In 2004, photographs of cowed Guantanamo prisoners in orange jump suits shocked the world.

"The majority are kept in isolation in cells that are no bigger than a toilet," said Katznelson. "There is no sea view. Instead, if they have a window, it looks out on to a bleak corridor. The cells are lined with steel from floor to ceiling, including the toilet, sink and bed base.

"There is a popular misconception that these men have had trials and been found guilty. Nothing is further from the truth. Not one of them has.

"The tortures that the Americans use are wide-ranging and inhuman. One is to blast the cell with freezing cold air. Another is to pretend to take the prisoners to a country like Egypt where prisoners are tortured, even to the extent of taking them on a mock flight, so they can be treated in a barbaric fashion."

Katznelson continued: "Inmates are offered three meals a day, but there are eight prisoners who have been on hunger strike for over a year asking either for a trial or to be set free.

"These men are force-fed twice a day. First they are strapped down with 16 different restrictions, including one that jerks their head back. Then a tube is fed through their nose and down into their stomach.

"The guards don't always use lubrication and regularly use the same tube for several different prisoners without bothering to clean it."

Guantanamo Bay has been rented as a military base from Cuba since 1903 for an unchanged $4,499 a year.

"As it is outside American territory the US Constitution doesn't apply," said Katznelson.

This may soon change as the US Supreme Court is about to reach a verdict on whether the Guantanamo Bay area is de facto American soil.

If so, the US Constitution does apply and the men will have the right to a fair and speedy trial.

You have to wonder what sort of souvenirs will be on sale at the "trials" -- if they ever have "trials".

Chris Floyd has more: Fun in the Sun: Gitmo Gets Makeover as R&R Resort

The Pentagon has splashed out for white sand beaches, a golf course, movie theaters, a bowling alley, restaurants – even a Wal-Mart – right next to the holding pens where Terror War captives have languished in limbo for years, enduring endless isolation,"harsh interrogation techniques" and other holiday amusements.

We don't mean to imply that the serious business going on at Gitmo is ignored, however. Far from it. The gift shop features several items that make antic hay of the concentration camp's dread purpose. Barbed wire and guard towers are a prevalent motif on various cups and shirts, for example. You can sip your beachside latte in a cup that tells the world that the Bush gulag is "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." And if you find froggies and dolphins a bit too frilly, you can always prepare your kids to take their rightful place in the Terror War imperium with a t-shirt emblazoned "Future Behavior Modification Instructor." It makes learning fun!
...

You can read more about the amenities enjoyed by the non-paying guests at Gitmo in this piece, which points you to a mass of material detailing their treatment, including the landmark series from McClatchy Newspapers.

US Military Attorney Accuses US Government Of Manufacturing Evidence

A US military attorney representing a suspect charged with murder has accused the US government of manufacturing evidence against his client.

Omar Khdar, 21 [photo], was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, allegedly during a battle against American forces. He has been held at Guantanamo Bay ever since, and he is now accused of murder. The US claims Khadr threw a grenade that caused the death of an American medic, Sgt. Christopher J. Speer.

Khadr's case is significant in a number of ways. Fabrication of evidence is the easiest to describe, but may not be the most alarming.

Khadr's attorney, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, says that on the day after the battle in which Sgt. Speer was killed, an American commander identified only as "Lieutenant Colonel W" wrote a report which said an American soldier had killed a man identified as the suspect in the slaying of Sgt. Speer.

But months later, according to Kuebler, a revised version of Lieutenant Colonel W's report was issued, bearing the same date as the original. In the revised version, the suspect had no longer been "killed", but merely "engaged".

Kuebler says the new report was presented to him by prosecutors, who told him it was an "updated" document. Obviously, if the man who killed Sgt. Speer is already dead, then Oman Khadr cannot possibly be guilty of that crime -- if indeed it was a crime.

Prosecutors did not dispute Kuebler's version of events, nor did they respond to a request for comment.

I wouldn't comment either, if I were in their shoes. But then I would never be in their shoes in the first place.

Not long ago, while discussing Bush's veto of a bill that would have restricted the CIA's use of torture, I mentioned professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School, who has been leading a team of law students through an examination of unclassified documents describing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The method used by Denbeaux's team is worthy of notice, in my opinion. They have taken a mass of documents from the Department of Defense, and put together a database representing the information in those documents.

They haven't questioned the veracity of any of these documents; instead they have used the documents themselves to confirm or deny the official pronouncements we've been hearing. And the results are not flattering to the official pronouncements.

One of the studies performed by Denbeaux's team looked at the claim -- made dozens of times by various government officials -- that "terrorists" who had been released from captivity at Guantanamo had "returned to the battlefield" and resumed "shooting at Americans". They studied unclassified summaries of the evidence against more than 500 detainees and found some very disturbing facts.

Only 5% of the detainees had been captured by American forces. Only 4% of the detainees were accused of having been on a battlefield, ever! And out of 516 unclassified summaries, only one so much as alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

This, of course, is exactly the allegation laid out against Omar Khadr. He's "the worst of the worst". And the evidence against him is fabricated.

Or perhaps to be fair I should rephrase that. Omar Khadr's attorney, who works for the American government and who surely must be feeling the same pressure to obtain convictions that the prosecution feels, nonetheless stands up for his client and alleges that the evidence against him was fabricated. And the prosecution doesn't dispute the charge. What does that tell you?

Chris Floyd has recently written about the case of Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi,

who was forced to flee from his home by American bombing raids in the early days of the attack on Afghanistan, and was then sold to American forces by local bounty hunters in December 2001. He has never been charged with any crime; indeed, one of Bush's own military panels declared that Al-Ghizzawi was not an "enemy combatant." One of the officers on the panel testified, under oath, that the evidence against the purchased prisoner was "garbage."

Chris asks:

Why was Al-Ghizzawi not freed long ago, when it was first determined that he was not an "enemy combatant," and therefore, even under the ludicrous legal theories of the Bush gulag, should not have been subject to indefinite detention without charge or trial?

He points to the answer, too:

Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of one of the minions most directly responsible for imposing Bush's perverse lust for torture: William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Defense Department. At Harper's, Scott Horton references the accounts given by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief military prosecutor in Guantánamo, of his conversations with Haynes. As noted in the Nation:

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

"If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?" This has been the crux of the matter for a long time concerning the many prisoners in Guantanamo who are innocent of any wrong-doing. (And it should be noted that all of the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held under an illegal and unjust system, backed up by force and torture -- a system that is a complete repudiation of the "civilized values" that the Terror War purports to defend.) What indeed can the Bush Regime -- and its willing executioners in Congress, including the Democratic "opposition," who have done nothing to shut down this shameful enterprise -- do with all these innocent people they've held captive for so long? It would be too embarrassing to admit that their incarceration was a mistake -- much less the crime that it undoubtedly is. And while some prisoners have been released from time to time -- usually under a cloud, often rendered into custody elsewhere -- it is clear that the Bush Regime's Gitmo endgame strategy is simple: put some of the captives on trial in the kangaroo court of rigged "military tribunals, and leave others, like Al-Ghizzawi, to rot and die in darkness, in silence, forgotten by the world.

That's exactly right, in my opinion. The decision, for people like Haynes, comes down to a simple comparison: What's worse: for innocent men to spend their entire lives in captivity? Or for us to be embarrassed?

The really strange part is how much they don't mind embarrassing themselves. Omar Khadr was captured when he was 15 years old. According to international law, he is supposed to be treated as a child soldier -- decommissioned and rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life. But the Bush administration sees more value in trashing international law than in obeying it, so there will be no rehabilitation for Omar Khadr, as far as the US is concerned. They simply want him for murder -- even for a murder he didn't commit.

As Scott Horton points out, the pressure to try and convict Omar Khadr is tremendous. As the Washington Post noted:

Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the "strategic political value" of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed "sexy" over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.

"Sexy"? What could be "sexier" than a murder trial conducted by a "system of justice" so rigged that even though no trial has even begun, four prosecutors have already resigned rather than participate in such a travesty?

Perhaps we will learn more about this case in the coming days. Because Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen, the Canadian press has taken much more interest in his story than they otherwise would have, and Khadr's lawyers have just been granted access to some important bits of evidence, including permission to interview the Lt. Col. who altered the report about Sgt. Speer's death.

Certain additional information has come to light as well, perhaps accidentally:

The Guantanamo judge also ruled that the prosecution must provide to the defence a list of all personnel who interrogated Mr. Khadr. If the defence wishes to interview any of those personnel, the judge ruled, the prosecution must provide phone numbers and times for such interviews.

One of those interrogators, it was revealed by mistake, was Sergeant Joshua Claus, a U.S. soldier involved in a case of torture in Afghanistan that left one prisoner dead.

Sgt. Claus's name was not supposed to be revealed, but the judge accidentally said the soldier's last name in court on Thursday. Because Sgt. Clause is believed to have been the interrogator present at virtually all Mr. Khadr's interrogations while he was held in Bagram base in Afghanistan, defence lawyers say the likelihood that Mr. Khadr was also tortured is high.

Sgt. Clause was one of 15 U.S. soldiers who faced charges after a young man, believed to be an innocent taxi driver, was brutally beaten and later found dead. Sgt. Clause eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five months in prison.

Ah, yes. The United States of Torture. Welcome to The Dark Side.

Bush Affirms His Legacy, Vetoes Ban On Torture

President Bush announced on Saturday that he had vetoed an intelligence authorization bill passed by both houses of Congress.

The mainstream press has focused on one particularly gruesome aspect of his decision: the bill the president vetoed would have restricted the range of interrogation techniques that could be used by the CIA; in particular, it would have banned waterboarding -- simulated drowning which has been recognized as torture and banned by all civilized countries for centuries.

In his weekly radio address to the nation, our first openly pro-torture president said:

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.

It wouldn't do that, of course. It wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from detaining people. And it wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from questioning them. It would only limit the techniques that could be used during the questioning.

But it would establish a limit. This is one of the crucial points -- and one which has nothing to do with the core issues. The bill would place limits on the president and his administration, and therefore it must be vetoed. Bush will never willingly sign any legislation which limits what he and his administration can do.

Fortunately for the president, this bill concerns terrorism, so it gives him a chance to use his favorite line:

We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks.

This is false, of course. The president's neglect, or abdication, or repudiation, of his higher responsibility -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as required by his oath of office -- is sufficient grounds not only for impeachment and removal from office, but also for criminal charges of treason, followed by a trial which could only end in a conviction and a public execution. No person of peace and goodwill could deny this; one could only hope that some "enhanced techniques" would be applied along the way.

But unfortunately much of the American public remains unaware of this, and the president is not about to tell them. Instead he continues to catapult the propaganda. Thus, in keeping with his self-appointed "highest responsibility", Bush listed the "plots" that have been "foiled" by "enhanced" interrogations:

The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. [...] Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.

If you've never heard of any of these claims about how interrogations under torture have led to foiled terrorist plots, don't feel badly about it. Nobody else has ever heard them either -- not even the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, who said:

"I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack."

In trying to justify his veto to the nation, the president said:

The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.

This statement is potentially misleading on many fronts simultaneously, but it's tough to tell because so much about the detainees and the means by which they have been interrogated is classified, and because so much of what the government has told us about these things has proven to be false.

Of special interest is the assertion -- made continually by the administration and others (including some supposedly dissident journalists) -- that "specialized interrogation procedures" have been used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists".

To make sense of this assertion, you have to do some mental gymnastics.

By "specialized interrogation procedures" he means the techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual. As the AP reports, the Field Manual prohibits

hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes; stripping prisoners naked; forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts; beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways; subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions; and waterboarding

The president says the "enhanced" techniques are only to be used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists". What does he mean by "small"?

According to Reuters,

CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.

Elsewhere it has been claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques have been used against only 14 of the most hardened al Q'aeda terrorists.

But it is very difficult to take these assertions seriously.

When the furore over destroyed interrogation videotapes erupted, we were told the interrogations were taped because "enhanced techniques" were being used and the tapes were meant to provide insurance against potential claims of excessive force or abusive behavior. But if this is so, then why were the tapes destroyed? If they showed no abuse of detainees, they would have provided powerful support for the government's position that only legal techniques were used.

In the absence of those tapes, one can do little more than speculate about the reasons why an additional 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo were also videotaped. Were "enhanced techniques" used in those interrogations as well? If so, then we've been lied to about the extent of abusive interrogation. And if not, why not? The prisoners at Guantanamo are said to be "the worst of the worst"; the "enhanced techniques" are said to yield crucial information; why wouldn't our interrogators use all the tools available to them? Don't they want us to be safe?

We can only speculate here because the truth is so comprehensively buried. But it's reasonable to assume that torturers don't want us to know much about what they're doing. As Bush explained in his radio address, he vetoed the bill in part because it banned secret techniques.

The bill Congress sent me [...] would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. [...] Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaeda operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures...

Given the torturers' penchant for secrecy, we must assume that we don't know very much about torture and "enhanced" interrogations -- that what we do know is only the "tip of the iceberg".

But what we already know is enormous and horrific; and the government's justification for its practices have all turned out to be false!

Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School has been leading a team of researchers through the documentation pertaining to the detainees at Guantanamo, as provided by the government. The research team has been using the government's own data to evaluate the claims made by the administration and has produced a series of reports whose conclusions are eerily similar: the government's assertions which are supposed to justify the policies have been spectacularly untrue.

One report, "The Meaning of Battlefield", provides the following executive summary:

The Department of Defense has continually relied upon the premise of “battlefield capture” to justify the indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. The “battlefield capture” proposition -- although proven false in almost all cases -- has been an important proposition for the Government, which has used it to frame detainee status as a military question as to which the Department of Defense should be granted considerable deference.

Further, just as the Government has characterized detainee’s initial captures as “on the battlefield,” Government officials have repeatedly claimed that ex-detainees have “returned to the battlefield,” where they have been re-captured or killed.

Implicit in the Government’s claim that detainees have “returned to the battlefield” is the notion that those detainees had been on a battlefield prior to their detention in Guantánamo. Revealed by the Department of Defense data, however, is that:

• only twenty-one (21)—or four percent (4%)—of 516 Combatant Status Review Tribunal unclassified summaries of the evidence alleged that a detainee had ever been on any battlefield;

• only twenty-four (24)—or five percent (5%)—of unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee had been captured by United States forces;

• and exactly one (1) of 516 unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

Just as the Government’s claims that the Guantánamo detainees “were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces,” do not comport with the Department of Defense’s own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have “returned to the fight.”

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of thirty” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed, but to date the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense:

• at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies;

• ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;

• and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, the names of two (2) do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantánamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantánamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.

Thus, the data provided by the Department of Defense indicates that every public statement made by Department of Defense officials regarding the number of detainees who have been released and thereafter killed or re-captured on the battlefield was false.

We knew it was false all along, didn't we? At least we should have suspected it. There's a tendency for this administration to lie about everything.

Unfortunately, most of our so-called "opposition" politicians haven't caught a whiff of this tendency, or else they've chosen to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. So the political reactions to the veto were interesting.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the "Massachusetts liberal" much derided by "conservatives", suggested that Congress should override the veto, which shows how out of touch with reality he is. As if more than a dozen Republican Senators and more than 50 Republican Congressmen would ever vote with the Democrats, against the president, for a bill he had already vetoed! But Kennedy said:

"Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world."

America's "good name" "in the eyes of the world" was gone a long time ago, but Senator Kennedy cannot mention that and remain in national office. Politicians of both parties must maintain the fiction that America is beloved in the eyes of the world, or else they risk being marginalized as "not serious". Forget the truth of the situation; the rhetoric is all that matters.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the key Democratic enablers of the current administration, gets this point, if nothing else; she threw in some sanctimonious manure of her own:

"Failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh torture techniques undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."

Talk about undermining our nation's moral authority!

Let's talk about failing to initiate impeachment proceedings -- oh no, let's not! Impeachment is off the table!

And once again the story-line has been predictable: a pack of lies from a president who was never legitimately elected in the first place, followed by some ass-covering by the people who should have been standing in his way for years, all wrapped up with a bow by the allegedly liberal New York Times, which headlined this particular story "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A.Tactics Affirms His Legacy".

In one sense, it's impossible to argue: Bush's legacy is now securely more despicable than any two American presidents combined, and he's still counting.

But in another sense, it's impossible not to scream!

"We Can't Have Acquittals": 9/11 Trials Set To Produce Only Convictions

Democracy Now! says "EXCLUSIVE: Rigged Trials At Guantanamo":

The 9/11 trials for the six Guantanamo prisoners charged by the Pentagon last week with conspiracy to commit war crimes might have been rigged from the start to rule out the possibility of any acquittals. This according to the latest statements to the Nation magazine from Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo"s military commissions.

Col. Davis recounted a 2005 meeting with the Bush administration-appointed Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the prosecutions and the defense for the tribunal process. Haynes said “We can't have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.”

Col. Davis resigned from the military commissions in October 2007 saying the system had become “politicized” and he could no longer be effective. His latest statements to the Nation magazine offer the most pointed evidence of the military commission's bias and undermine the Bush administration's claims of ensuring fair trials for the accused.

There's more at the link.

Funhouse Mirror: Looking At America With The New York Times

Ages ago -- Monday -- in a bizarre year-end editorial called "Looking At America", the New York Times listed some of the most egregious wrongs of the past seven years.

President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Indeed. And that's not all.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

All this makes perfect sense, does it not?

It condemns the Bush administration -- Bush and Cheney particularly -- for egregious and obvious crimes: crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the people of America, crimes against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, crimes against humanity itself..

So what's bizarre?

First, the "explanation" for all these crimes:

This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

And second, the proposed solution:

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

What kind of a mirror is the New York Times using?

Against all indications, the NYT attributes the actions of the Bush administration to "panic and ideology".

It's clear that neither Bush nor Cheney have panicked -- on 9/11 or ever since. They've been sitting quietly, watching the universe unfold -- right into their laps!

And it's even clearer that their ideology plays a heavy role in what they have done. So why talk about panic?

For that matter, why talk about "this new enemy" without trying to identify it?

The Bush administration took less than a day to decide who was to be held responsible for 9/11, less than a month to start bombing Afghanistan, less than two months to pass the enormous and egregious PATRIOT Act, and more than a year to empower a whitewash disguised as an investigation. What does that tell you?

The administration was (and still is) heavily populated by members of an extremist group which called for a cataclysmic attack on America, in order to enable their radical agenda, just before the 2000 election.

They wanted the catastrophic events of 9/11 to happen, they were ready for them to happen, and they took full advantage of them when they did happen. What does that tell you?

They were in position to make it happen, and they have done everything in their power to deceive us about the how and why of almost everything ever since! ... And we're supposed to believe they're telling us the truth about 9/11!

Alas, the official story of 9/11 is a shaky one, and our nation's leading paper could knock it down with one good investigative series -- but they won't. They'd prefer to enumerate the abuses we suffer at the hands of our own government and hope that we can vote our way out of trouble.

But the Times' prescription for healing America bears absolutely no resemblance to reality!

It's not the voters' fault that Bush got into the White House in the first place, and it's not their fault that he got to stay there for a second term. Both presidential elections were not only stolen by the Republicans but also given away by the Democrats, and the major American media -- led by the purportedly liberal New York Times -- played a huge role in legitimizing the theft, if not the giveaway.

Even now -- even though the illegitimacy of both "elections" is obvious, and even though the ideology of the "winners" has caused us enormous damage, the nation's "leading" newspaper will still not investigate or even acknowledge election fraud, unless it happens in a foreign country.

Even now -- with the official story of 9/11 in tatters -- the NYT will not investigate the events of that day, or even acknowledge that the official story is a crock of manure.

It's only fitting, I suppose, in a fun-house mirror kind of way, for the New York Times to say:

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.

In point of awful fact, the only people who have "the integrity, principle and decency" to use "the awesome powers of the presidency" "honorably" are ignored, if not denigrated, by the nation's corporate press as a whole and by the New York Times in particular.

The hypocrisy required for the New York Times to pontificate about the "wisdom" of the American voters is absolutely beyond measure.

So much for the "liberal media".

If you don't have symptoms resembling stomach flu, you haven't been paying attention.

Tom Toles: Freeze!

Speed Bump: TIME Spins While The Constitutional Republic Burns

Get a load of this spin! From Reynolds Holding at TIME Online:

How to Botch Another Terror Case

How many times does the Bush Administration have to bungle a legal challenge to its detention of suspected terrorists — and, thanks to its own deception, leave yet another shady suspect looking sympathetic — before it gets its act in order?

I nominate this opening paragraph for a "Deceptive Frame Of The Month" award, based on the fact that this case is not entirely -- or even mostly -- about the bungling of a legal challenge. But who cares? Not Reynolds Holding -- clearly. I can't even count the rotations!

A week after two judges halted detainee hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, over a statutory glitch, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ordered Al Saleh Kahlah al-Marri released from military detention. As a civilian in the United States on a student visa, al-Marri has the right to a full and fair hearing in court and cannot be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant in the war on terror, the court ruled Monday.

Al-Marri won't get out of the military brig in South Carolina immediately,

... if he ever gets out at all ...

but the Administration has to decide soon whether to try him in criminal court, hold him temporarily as a grand jury witness against other suspected terrorists, deport him — or let him go.

And there's the rub. Who defines "soon"? "Soon" to a geologist means "sometime in the next ten or twenty thousand years". To those guys, the Rockies are "young mountains".

And there's your answer: they can hold him forever as long as they keep promising to do something else "soon". But first they can spend years appealing the decision.

As for letting him go, Reynolds Holding presumes to know what everybody thinks; always a bad sign:

Probably no one outside of al-Marri's wife and kids in Peoria, Illinois, prefers the last option.

Why not? Because he's been accused of something?

In a word, yes!

A citizen of Qatar, al-Marri allegedly trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, palled around with Osama Bin Laden and came to the U.S. on Sept. 10, 2001 as a "sleeper agent," a computer hacker bent on disrupting the American financial system. He was arrested at home three months later as a material witness in the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks. Al-Marri denies any connection with al-Qaeda or terrorism, but constitutional issues aside, we might all rest easier if the military could just keep him out of circulation for awhile.

Why should we toss constitutional issues aside? That's the heart of this case -- the crux of the problem.

What? Did you think the big issue was keeping al-Marri out of circulation for a while?

They've kept him out of circulation for five years already! Is it awhile yet? And if not, when will it be awhile? Are people entitled to a hearing? A trial? Or should the military be allowed to keep people incarcerated forever just because of an allegation?

After all, that's what it has been allowed to do with people like Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured while fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan (he was eventually deported to Saudi Arabia in exchange for renouncing his citizenship). Al-Marri isn't even a citizen, and he was caught allegedly pursuing terrorism within the U.S. Isn't he exactly the kind of guy that the Administration should be allowed to declare an enemy combatant and hold in a military brig?

Listen: What's in an accusation? And if the accusation is serious enough, does that mean the accused is guilty without a trial?

These are not rhetorical questions: the answers we produce now may guide our hand for generations. And it might matter quite a bit.

For instance, the president has been accused of foreknowledge of 9/11. Isn't that a fairly serious accusation? And isn't he exactly the kind of guy that We The People should be allowed to declare an enemy combatant and hold in a military brig?

I don't think so: I think he should have a fair trial before he's sent away for the rest of his miserable life ... but then again, there's so much more evidence against Bush than there is against Al-Marri that perhaps a trial is not even necessary!

But the real question is this: Should the administration be allowed to declare somebody an enemy combatant -- without hearing, without a trial, without providing any evidence whatsoever -- and then hold that person in a military brig forever without a hearing, without a trial, without presenting any evidence?

Reynolds Holding says:

This is not an easy question.

But that's not true. Not even close. It's as easy a question as there is in law or politics. It boils down to "Are we or are we not innocent until proven guilty?"

If we live under a rule of law, there's due process -- not indefinite detention and torture -- for all defendants, in all cases, no matter what crime the defendant is accused of committing.

But that didn't even come up in this case. They chose to split another hair instead. Or as Reynolds Holder rotates it,

Fortunately, two of the three appeals-court judges were clear-headed enough to see a distinction.

You don't need to see any distinctions on this case unless you want to spin it. And unfortunately for the slight little matter of Constitutional law, this story contains several built-in spin-points.

Hamdi and others captured while actively fighting the U.S. on a foreign battlefield, or shortly after leaving the battlefield, naturally fit under the laws of war and can be held, with minimal rights, by the military so that they do not return to the enemy to fight again.

Naturally? Maybe so. But in more temperate times, one might be excused for asking the following question:

Why is it that somebody "actively fighting the U.S. on a foreign battlefield" is worthy of a lifetime of detention and torture, while somebody actively fighting foreigners in their own countries is considered to be engaged in a noble cause and serving his country (and therefore worthy of a lifetime of neglect at Walter Reed)?

Oh, right! It's because Americans are better than anybody else in the entire world, and can do no wrong! Sorry about that; it just slipped my mind for a moment.

In the actual court case,

The Bush Administration argued that al-Marri was also an enemy combatant, committed to fighting on behalf of al-Qaeda, but the court didn't see it that way. It ruled that al-Marri, no matter how dangerous, is just a civilian. And any civilian in the U.S. legally has the right when arrested to hear the charges against him, to be tried by a jury and to receive all the other benefits of due process under the Constitution. As the three-judge panel said in its majority opinion, to allow the President "to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them 'enemy combatants,' would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country."

Well of course it would, especially when you consider that there is no requirement for the President to substantiate his claim. All he has to do is call you an "enemy combatant"? He can throw you in prison forever on the strength of that unsubstantiated claim? How would you feel about it if it happened to you?

It's a question Reynolds Holding appears to have asked himself; he and his editors are obviously in agreement on it. Thus they feed us relentless spin, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that when it comes to this presidency, and especially the GWOT, all is not what it seems. So we get statements like this one:

Though compelling, the panel's conclusion is not obvious,

Oh yes it is, unless you're ignorant of civilized law ... or unless you've been brainwashed!

and the full court to which the Administration has appealed may disagree (as might the U.S. Supreme Court, if it ever hears the case).

Of course, the full court, or possibly the Supreme Court, may disagree -- and they may do so for motives entirely unrelated to the merits of the case. No? Bah! They do that all the time! What would make this any different?

The Administration, then, can't necessarily be blamed for trying to treat al-Marri as an enemy combatant so that it could detain him indefinitely and prevent him from rejoining the enemy during the war on terror, right?

Wrong! They certainly could be blamed, but not by a "journalist" who is busy polishing their jackboots with his tongue! Even if that was what they were doing.

Except that's apparently not what the Administration was up to.

Oops! Wrong again!!

As Marty Lederman, a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law School, points out, al-Marri was already on ice. He was being held on credit-card fraud and other criminal charges for 16 months before the president abruptly designated him an enemy combatant in June 2003 and had him moved to a military prison. And the move came shortly after a court scheduled a hearing on al-Marri's motion to suppress evidence allegedly obtained through torture.

But how can that be? We don't torture! And we've got all sorts of shifty new legal definitions to prove it.

In a long footnote to its opinion, the appeals court suggests what was really going on. As the court explains, al-Marri claimed that the government suddenly named him an enemy combatant merely because it wanted to interrogate him in a way that would have violated the rules of criminal prosecution. Referring to al-Marri's claim, the court says, "we trust that this is not so, for such a stratagem" would violate a Supreme Court ruling that prohibits indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation.

Sad but true, the justices of this court -- like many other still-deluded citizens -- "trust" their naive view of this clearly criminal administration more than they "trust" the evidence -- even when there's no alternative explanation, as in this case:

"We note, however, that not only has the Government offered no other explanation for abandoning al-Marri's prosecution, it has even propounded an affidavit in support of al-Marri's continued military detention stating that he 'possesses information of high intelligence value.'"

That's pretty clear, isn't it? Or is it? Why should the court "trust" that what they have been told is false?

Especially when the implications of that evidence is clear, even to Reynolds Holder:

So, contrary to Supreme Court precedent as well as its own legal arguments before the appeals court, the Administration threw al-Marri in the brig just because it wanted to squeeze him for more information.

Or maybe not. The problem with this explanation is that our authorities know "enhanced interrogation techniques" don't provide reliable intelligence. So we must look elsewhere for an explanation.

Is this just the latest in a long string of GWOT-related government lies, parroted without question by organs of state propaganda? Unfortunately, given the track records of the administration and its lapdog media, we cannot avoid asking this question, which otherwise might seem quite loony. But there's been too much lying, and now there's no reason not to question everything. You just never know.

This sort of deceptive behavior seems a recurring flaw in the Administration's anti-terrorism efforts.

Recurring flaw? Heck, no, that's not a flaw! It's the artist's signature! It's the modus operandi!

The current prosecution of suspected terrorist and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, for example, almost collapsed because of Padilla's claim that his guards' abuse made him incompetent to stand trial; as with al-Marri, the government has changed its legal approach against Padilla, initially branding him an enemy combatant and then, when it seemed that it might lose its case before the Supreme Court, deciding to charge him criminally.

These are all examples (and I could provide many more) of the administration lurching from one ludicrous lie to another, in an attempt to legitimize an illegitimate enterprise! The phony "terror war" needs a continuous supply of phony "terrorists" so the government can provide phony "protection" which they use to "justify" becoming more and more repressive!

It's all very clear, and it has been clear (to some of us at least) since about noon on the eleventh of September, 2001. But unfortunately for all of us, journalists who say things like this get published nowhere.

On the other hand, even if you write for a state propaganda organ like TIME, you can still talk about the technicalities:

Lederman says the improper reason for declaring al-Marri an enemy combatant will probably doom the government's appeal in the case.

And rightly so. But that's scary, too. Because the appeal should be doomed even without the improper reason. If opponents of the Bush administration's new approach, "indefinite incarceration without hearing or evidence", want to make their feelings known, now would be as good a time as any.

Thinking of the assertion that the appeal is doomed, Reynolds Holder concludes with the following very confused paragraph:

Whether or not that's true, the President seems once again to have jeopardized his "war on terror" with an inflated notion of his own power.

Oops! Whether or not that's true is highly debatable.

I would phrase it differently: Bush is using the "war on terror" to justify an inflation of his own power. He hit a little speed bump the other day, but the mission is still on target.

I find it interesting to speculate on how Reynolds Holding and his editors at TIME would approach this subject if they were more familiar with the history of totalitarian states -- the USSR, for example.

He might have said something about how the right of habeas corpus has been a basic part of all western justice systems for 900 years, about how we don't have that protection anymore, and about how the Congress hasn't shown any sign of trying to get it back.

He might have mentioned that of the nearly 400 people being detained at Gitmo, only a handful have been charged, and -- even though the "rules of evidence" have been "relaxed" -- the government doesn't have enough evidence against them to charge more than another dozen or so.

He might have mentioned that many of the people there were detained because they were sold into captivity. And how even though they've never been charged with any crime -- much less convicted! -- they may very well stay incarcerated for the rest of their lives! He might even have mentioned some of the people who are still being held there, despite having been told they're free to leave!

In short, Reynolds Holder might have made a bit of a difference.

But then again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So why should he share it with his readers?