Guantanamo deaths: some pushback

Since I did a post earlier about Scott Horton's article that raised serious questions about the official investigation into three deaths at Guantanamo in 2006 -- strongly suggesting that an unacknowledged site might have been where they met their deaths rather than by hanging themselves in their cells -- I thought it only fair to note that Horton's article has been criticized by people whose opinions I believe are worth considering. Jack Shafer, who does media criticism for Slate, is to my mind the best media critic out there and a long way from being a kneejerk apologist for the government, so his comments that Horton “never comes close to making its case that prisoners Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani may have been murdered at a secret CIA installation at Gitmo . . .” is worth considering. There's also a blogger at First Things, the theocon site, named Joe Carter, who has critiqued Horton's piece here, here, here, and here. Neocons are seldom right, but his posts are mostly critiques and some of his p[oints are worth considering.

I still think Horton's piece is important, and taken with the critique of the official Navy investigation done at University at least make the case that that report is seriously lacking. And Scott was pretty careful not to go beyond his evidence. He doesn't say he's proven the site was a secret CIA installation, he says that's one of the possibilities, and that the official Navy report failed to reach all potential eyewitnesses including the ones he interviewed. Troubling enough.

Guantanamo more complicated than Obama hoped

The suspicion keeps growing that when it comes to national security policies -- even those that Obama has promised to abandon or change from the bad old Bush days -- Obama is turning out to look a whole lot like GWB. The atmospherics are different, of course, as are some of the priorities. But as noted before, he's maintaining dragnet electronic surveillance and using the state secrets flim-flam to keep cases from going to court, just like Bush.

Now the delay of two panels, one on interrogation and one on closing Gitmo, engeenders further skepticism. There's no reason, in my view, and as this Register editorial contends, to delay a report on torture -- just announce you're fgollowing the Army Field Manual. Guantanamo, on the other hand, embodies some legitimate complications. There are probably some -- fewer than the government thinks, I suspect, but some -- there whom almost nobody would want released, yet who can't be tried in a U.S. court for various reasons.

Good start on Gitmo

As expected, Pres. Obama has announced the the prison camp at Guantanamo will be closed within a year. As I've mentioned in several places, it won't be easy. A few of those characters are really dangerous, some can't be released to their home countries without serious fear that they'll be seriously tortured, and the European countries have refused to take any of them in large part because the U.S. won't take any (even the Uighurs, Chinese Muslims everybody acknowledges should never have been there). But even the Bushies acknowledge that some have no business being there, so making the decision is a good start.

Incidentally, the WaPo ran a fascinating story Sunday, noting that the military officers first assigned to Gitmo did almost everything right, obeying the Geneva conventions though it wasn't strictly required and establishing a reasonably humane environment. Then the civilians, mainly Rumsfeld, got involved and things went downhill.

Here's the Register's editorial. On this one my old friend Steve Chapman agrees.

End of military commissions?

My, I'm late getting things up here. Here's a link to the piece I did last week for Antiwar.com elaborating quite a bit more than in the Register editorial on issues surrounding the military commission verdict in Hamdan's case. I'm inclined to give the judge and the jury props for trying to run a reasonably fair trial despite the rules that they could have followed more scrupulously that rig the proceeding completely against the defendant. I think their 5-1/2-year sentence is a slap ion the face to the administration -- well-deserved.

The Hamdan verdict

A little late, perhaps, but here's a link to the Register's editorial on the verdict in the military trial of Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. I don't know whether the officers on the jury were trying to save the commission system by trying to deliver a fair verdict despite overzealous prosecution, or were expressing their disgust at the system. Either way, it's a thumb in the eye to the administration.

Where the U.S. learned to torture

Here is the Register's editorial on how the U.S. developed various torture techniques after 9/11. As I had mentioned previously, those who follow such issues had thought they had been adapted from the training U.S. military and CIA people in resisting torture, or at least being aware of what might be coming. The techniques tended to be what could be expected to be encountered in the Cold War with communism, and informed by the torture ("brainwashing," we preferred to call it back then) U.S. servicepeople encountered when captured by the North Koreans. So we were essentially copying the communists. Now the NYT has tracked down an old article describing Korean communist torture techniques, published in 1957, with a chart describing the techniques and their effects. The precise chart-- with the title removed -- was used to train interrogators at Guantanamo. So the communization of the U.S. military and intelligence services accelerated under a Republican president. Cheered on by people who in the old days called themselves anti-communists. Ah, the joys of Empire!

The Constitution vindicated

The ruling by the Supreme Court allowing the Guantanamo detainees to file habeas corpus motions in U.S. courts was welcome, perhaps even overdue. Here's a link to the Register editorial commending it; note that we got more critical comments than praise from readers. I think it explains the importance of habeas corpus to a society with any hope of being free pretty well. I'm frankly shocked that conservatives especially, at least those who claim to have any respect at all for the U.S. Constitution, could be so critical, but most of them are positively apoplectic. It's another example of how war warps peoples' judgment and endangers liberty.

It is simply breathtaking how thoroughly the Bush administration has distorted the constitutional order and expanded executive power to an extent even Hamilton, the founder most friendly to executive power, who commended "energy in the executive," would find downright shocking. To think that the Bushies thought they could just hold people indefinitely, some for 6 years, without charges or access to anything resembling an impartial arbiter. Even the military prosecutors first assigned to prosecute detainees were shocked at how blatantly the administration politicized the process, and several have quit and criticized the process severely.

The Bushies have been slapped hard by the high court, a sign that there is still some durability in the Madisonian separation of powers arrangement designed to protect liberty -- not that it's perfect, but it still sometimes works. The Bushies brought it on themselves, with their arrogant determination not to classify them as POWs or to offer anything resembling due process. It's quite possible that there's no reason for Guantanamo to be kept open any longer now. The administration obviously chose it so they could argue that it wasn't on U.S. soil, so the constitution didn't apply. I would say shockingly cynical but nothing this administration does shocks me any more. The Supremes shot that one down. Here's a link to a Scotusblog post with links to a variety of coverage and commentary, and a pretty good summary.

I talked to Tim Lynch over at Cato, and he stressed what had been in the Cato amicus brief: that the key was not whether Guantanamo is U.S. soil, but that the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over the president and secretary of defense, so it can prevent them from denying habeas corpus wherever in the world they give orders to do so. Otherwise they could simply move prisoners to foreign soil and mistreat them at will. Tim found one sentence in the 70-page decision he thought came close to expressing his view: that the scope of habeas corpus "must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain," but it's not explicit enough to suit me.