Innocent prisoner forced to give false confessions

[LnGrrrR]

Yet another example of where torture leads to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/a-truly-shocking-guantana_b_305227.html



The judge also noted the significance of the evidence in the record indicating that al-Rabiah "subsequently confided in interrogators [redacted] that he was being pressured to falsely confess to the allegations discussed above," and also the significance of the fact that, although "al-Rabiah's interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him," they "never believed his confessions based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports."

After noting -- again with a palpable sense of incredulity -- that "These are the confessions that the Government now asks the Court to accept as evidence in this case," Judge Kollar-Kotelly proceeded to demolish them all, breaking them down into three periods: the first, when "there were no allegations directed toward al-Rabiah and al-Rabiah provided no confessions"; the second, when the supposed eyewitnesses "made their now-discredited allegations and al-Rabiah was told of the allegations against him, but al-Rabiah nevertheless made no confessions"; and the third (which, shockingly, continued "until the present"), when "al-Rabiah confessed to the now-discredited allegations against him, as well as to other 'evidence' that interrogators told him they possessed, when, in fact, such evidence did not exist."


And before people start up with 'activist' judge crap, Judge Kollar-Kotelly was originally appointed by Reagan, and has been supported by both Dems and Repubs during her career.

From wikipedia: On October 3, 1984, Kollar-Kotelly was nominated as an associate judge of the D.C. Superior Court by President Ronald Reagan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan); she took her oath of office on October 21. She served as Deputy Presiding Judge, Criminal Division from 1997 to 1997. She was appointed as a judge to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by President Bill Clinton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton) on March 26, 1997, to a seat vacated by Harold H. Greene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_H._Greene); she took her oath of office on May 12, 1997. Chief Justice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice) William Rehnquist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist) appointed Judge Kollar-Kotelly to serve on the Financial Disclosure Committee (2000-02), and later as Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court), where she served from 2002 to 2009.

[boutons_deux]

dickhead: torture has save 100s of 1000s of lives.

[Galileo]

Yet another example of where torture leads to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/a-truly-shocking-guantana_b_305227.html



And before people start up with 'activist' judge crap, Judge Kollar-Kotelly was originally appointed by Reagan, and has been supported by both Dems and Repubs during her career.

From wikipedia: On October 3, 1984, Kollar-Kotelly was nominated as an associate judge of the D.C. Superior Court by President Ronald Reagan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan); she took her oath of office on October 21. She served as Deputy Presiding Judge, Criminal Division from 1997 to 1997. She was appointed as a judge to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by President Bill Clinton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton) on March 26, 1997, to a seat vacated by Harold H. Greene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_H._Greene); she took her oath of office on May 12, 1997. Chief Justice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice) William Rehnquist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist) appointed Judge Kollar-Kotelly to serve on the Financial Disclosure Committee (2000-02), and later as Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court), where she served from 2002 to 2009.

good post. You are a true Patriot and defender on Liberty.

[CosmicCowboy]

and having made a trip to Bangladesh in 2000 to delivery kidney dialysis fluid to a hospital in the capital, Dhaka.

What an odd, random, thing to do, completely out of nowhere.

Of course, Osama Bin Laden has type 2 diabetes with kidney damage...

naaa...of course there couldn't possibly be a connection...

[boutons_deux]

KK was the judge who handed Microsoft a silly wrist-slap in the monopoly case.

[LnGrrrR]

What an odd, random, thing to do, completely out of nowhere.

Of course, Osama Bin Laden has type 2 diabetes with kidney damage...

naaa...of course there couldn't possibly be a connection...

Cmon, spell it out CC. I'm guessing you're explicitly discounting his other work for charities and refugee aid? And endorsing the idea that he somehow maintained a dual life as an Al Qaeda operative and a Kuwaiti desk worker?

And what of the stories he provided, that contained factual impossibilities that the interrogators themselves didn't believe? How about the fact that he was told that if he took back his confessions he would be punished?

[CosmicCowboy]

Aw c'mon...the guy just wakes up one morning and thinks "hmmm...I want to do something charitable today...hmm...I've got it!...I think I'll take some dialysis fluid to Bangladesh!"

[Winehole23]

Can the government please bring better evidence? We've already lost 30 of 38 habeas hearings. That is historically speaking an astounding losing streak for the government. After eight years, and harsh measures applied, loses about 3 out of every four cases that are heard.

The judges see no legal good basis for having detained these men in the first place, in a large majority of cases. That is why the government is losing. Their post-modern theories of *mosaic* truth and secret hearsay and harsh conditions were never designed to stand up in a courtroom.

Maybe it were wiser to have designed it that way, to build triable cases. But maybe that wouldn't have been consistent with keeping everybody indefinitely.

Hell, why even assemble case files (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/24/AR2009012401702.html?hpid=moreheadlines)? We'll get around to that later...

...oops, its later.

Our own impromptu legal appliance got cold feet, and eventually succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and objections to its poor quality and politicized character, leaving an onerous backlog of detainees after freeing what, 600 of 800 now?

That much seems to have changed, though not much else.

[Winehole23]

What an odd, random, thing to do, completely out of nowhere.

Of course, Osama Bin Laden has type 2 diabetes with kidney damage...

naaa...of course there couldn't possibly be a connection...The judge didn't think so.

[Winehole23]

The basic factual situation in this case is that we forced a man to testify falsely against himself. It makes us look real bad.

[Winehole23]

We submitted confessions our own interrogators had previously dismissed as unreliable, as evidence against the man.

The government received a fierce tongue-lashing from Kollar-Kotelly.

[PEP]

Well lets hope that this dude wont go back to Ahl Queada once he's back home. And if he just so happens to be killed on the battlefield or captured I'm sure the next thing we'll hear is that he turned out that way because he was tortured! waahh

Lets hope he doesnt turn out like these former Gitmo vacationers.

A former Guantanamo detainee has reportedly been killed in a shootout between the Yemeni Army and Houthi rebels in northern Yemen. The former detainee, Fahd Saleh Suleiman al Jutayli, was captured in Pakistan after fleeing the Tora Bora Mountains in 2001. He was repatriated to his native Saudi Arabia in May 2006.

According to the Yemen Post, two other former Gitmo detainees - Yusuf al Shehri and Othman al Ghamdi – called their families to tell them Jutayli had been killed in the fighting and asked them to inform Jutayli’s family.

Earlier this year, the Saudi government included all three of these former Guantanamo detainees – Jutayli, Shehri, and Ghamdi - on a list of the Kingdom’s 85 most wanted terrorists. After being released from Guantanamo, the three graduated from Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation programand joined eight other former Gitmo detainees in fleeing south to Yemen. All eleven joined al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Or these dudes....

The two Russian citizens, Airat Vakhitov and Rustam Akhmyarov, who were seized in a counter-terrorist operation in Afghanistan and kept at the Guantanamo base in Cuba with other Taliban and terrorist suspects, and then extradited home to Russia, have been detained and are now being held in a Russian detention centre.

They are charged with preparing and carrying out a series of terrorist acts in the Central Russian Povolzhye region.

Three other former Guantanamo prisoners have been detained in Russia’s Tatarstan Republic on the same charges, the paper adds.
All in all, of the seven Russian Guantanamo prisoner extradited from Cuba in 2004, only two are not in custody.

Or this wacko...

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

Or here....

American Muslim Teenager Killed in Bombing by Ex-Gitmo Detainee


A Lackawanna High School student who traveled to Yemen to be married last month was one of the victims of a terrorist bombing Wednesday at the U. S. Embassy in Yemen, the woman’s school principal said.


Or what about Abdul Qayum Zakir....

In 2001, he surrendered to US and Afghan forces in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif as the regime was collapsing. He spent the next several years in custody, was transferred to Guantanamo around 2006, then to Afghanistan government custody in late 2007, and was eventually released around May 2008. American officials won't say why he was let go and have not released a photograph of him.

Zakir wasted little time rekindling his relationship with the Taliban, especially its inner shura, or leadership council, based in Pakistan. According to some accounts, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar appointed Zakir as a senior military commander in mid-2008. He quickly developed a reputation as a charismatic leader.

[Winehole23]

Well lets hope that this dude wont go back to Ahl Queada once he's back home. And if he just so happens to be killed on the battlefield or captured I'm sure the next thing we'll hear is that he turned out that way because he was tortured! waahhBecause that would be unthinkable, right?

[LnGrrrR]

Aw c'mon...the guy just wakes up one morning and thinks "hmmm...I want to do something charitable today...hmm...I've got it!...I think I'll take some dialysis fluid to Bangladesh!"

So... that's your whole case? What about the other things I mentioned? You're disregarding ALL the counterfactuals and really zero'ing in on this ONE piece of information?

Was Osama Bin Laden chilling in this hospital? Do you have ANY sort of documentation in favor of your wildly speculative claim?

[LnGrrrR]

Can the government please bring better evidence? We've already lost 30 of 38 habeas hearings. That is historically speaking an astounding losing streak for the government. After eight years, and harsh measures applied, loses about 3 out of every four cases that are heard.

The judges see no legal good basis for having detained these men in the first place, in a large majority of cases. That is why the government is losing. Their post-modern theories of *mosaic* truth and secret hearsay and harsh conditions were never designed to stand up in a courtroom.

Maybe it were wiser to have designed it that way, to build triable cases. But maybe that wouldn't have been consistent with keeping everybody indefinitely.

Hell, why even assemble case files (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/24/AR2009012401702.html?hpid=moreheadlines)? We'll get around to that later...

...oops, its later.

Our own impromptu legal appliance got cold feet, and eventually succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and objections to its poor quality and politicized character, leaving an onerous backlog of detainees after freeing what, 600 of 800 now?

That much seems to have changed, though not much else.


Cmon Winehole... NO ONE could have predicted that government agents would abuse the extraordinary powers allotted to them.

[LnGrrrR]

Well lets hope that this dude wont go back to Ahl Queada once he's back home. And if he just so happens to be killed on the battlefield or captured I'm sure the next thing we'll hear is that he turned out that way because he was tortured! waahh

Lets hope he doesnt turn out like these former Gitmo vacationers.


There's two options:

1) Release prisoners we don't have strong evidence for, and take a chance that they might actually be terrorists

2) Keep all people as terrorists indefinitely even if we don't even have evidence that they're terrorists

Surely, option 2 is much more just.