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Put the insurrectionists and white supremacists in the building their party made,
This failed political promise will turn thirteen this year. By the end of Biden's first term it will be almost old enough to vote.
Put the insurrectionists and white supremacists in the building their party made,
Hard disagree, the criminal justice track is swifter and surer to convict.
A lot of these guys are terrorists and we can't prove it so letting them loose is a minefield should they return to terrorism. Probably what Obama found out when he took office. The left is very anti-America and anti-US government (many times rightly) but stanning for the gitmo terrorists is something thankfully I don't ever see much even from them.
Then they should be freed. Sorry, but respecting and applying our own laws isn't anti-america or anti-us government. It's simply much, much worse in the long run if we start picking and choosing which laws apply to who.
The whole parallel system of justice with 'enemy combatants' is entirely anti-american.
Not letting detainees free because it's politically inexpedient isn't justice, it's more like the opposite. If you can't prove on people, you're supposed to let them go, but I guess Americans are cool with preventive detention now.
Our secret courts in Cuba are terrible at convicting anybody for anything. Let the federal courts sort it out instead, just release them into the regular criminal justice system and turn the page.
Chumpettes' feelings are no longer hurt on this one, tbh.
It's not about hurt feelings, it's about having a justice system worthy to bear the name. Infinite detention, torture and secret trials shouldn't be the American way.
US black site at Gitmo "falls into disrepair,"detainees transferred.
it's AP style not to use the word "torture" when describing US policies.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-a...05-p57ggz.htmlA once-secret unit within the Guantanamo Bay detention centre that had fallen into disrepair has been closed and the prisoners moved to another facility on the American base in Cuba.
The prisoners at Camp 7 were transferred to another unit as part of what US Southern Command said in a statement on Sunday (Monday AEDT) was an effort to “increase operational efficiency and effectiveness”.
Camp 7 opened in December 2006 for prisoners previously held in a network of clandestine CIA detention facilities, often referred to as “black sites,” where they were subjected to brutal interrogation techniques. The military ran it under an agreement with CIA and Southern Command said intelligence agencies were involved with the transfer.
The United States has transferred a detainee out of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for the first time since President Joe Biden took office, sending a Moroccan man back home years after he was recommended for discharge.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...?sf147720908=1The Periodic Review Board process determined that Nasser’s detention no longer remained necessary to protect US national security, the Pentagon said on Monday in a statement.
hypothesis: what the US did to innocent Afghans at Gitmo and Bagram lost the hearts and minds of the Afghan people right at the beginning.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/280820...hanistan-oped/The fall of the Taliban and the loya jirga’s choice of Hamid Karzai as the leader of the Afghan Transitional Administration is the point at which the US should have ended its independent military operations, but instead, as the author Anand Gopal explained to me when I met him during his research for his excellent book No Good Men Along the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, the US “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” blundering around the country in search of enemies, but with no ability whatsoever to know who to ally themselves with, or to assess when they were being played by warlords with their own agenda. From June 2002 until November 2003, at least 110 more Afghans were sent to Guantánamo, making up the majority of prisoners sent to the prison at that time.
Disastrously poor intelligence
As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, US forces were so ignorant about who they were working with that at least 17 of those sent to Guantánamo had actually been working for the the Afghan Transitional Administration — or even for the Americans — but had been lied about by rivals, and yet the US intelligence was so poor that no one realized, or, perhaps, even cared.
One startling example was Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, who had helped to free several prominent anti-Taliban individuals — including Ismail Khan, who later became a minister in Karzai’s government — from a Taliban jail. To avoid Taliban reprisals, he had fled to Iran, where he stayed for several years, but, after returning to Afghanistan following the US-led invasion, someone told lies about him, and he ended up in Guantánamo, where all his requests for his captors to contact the Karzai government or Ismail Khan to verify his iden y fell on deaf ears. After he died of cancer in December 2007, I worked with Carlotta Gall on a front-page story for the New York Times telling the shameful account of his treatment, but no apology was ever forthcoming.
Also sent to Guantánamo at this time were eight prisoners captured in a compound run by a warlord named Samoud Khan, including three who were just boys at the time — somewhere between 10 and 13 years of age. It seems unclear whether Samoud Khan was engaging in activities against the US forces, or against a rival warlord, but what is clear is that the boys were merely servants, probably recruited unwillingly, with one of them also required to act as something of a sex slave.
At the other end of the age scale was 78-year old Haji Nazrat Khan, who had been seized when he went to inquire why his son, Izatullah Nazrat Yar, a local tribal leader, who supervised the collection of weapons from his people, as requested by US forces and the Karzai administration, had been arrested by US forces.
At Guantánamo, Haji Nazrat Khan told his US captors, “after the Soviet Union fell, we were expecting, waiting for Americans to help us to create and build up a new government. Unfortunately, they did not do it. Then the Taliban took over and they committed atrocities, killing, and any brutality they could. Talib means educated student or to learn things, but they were not that kind of people. Then, during the Taliban time, the opportunity opened for people to come from all over the world. The terrorist and any other kind of person came to Afghanistan and destroyed our honor and our dignity. Bin Laden, we hate him more than you guys and you people do not realize who is an enemy and who is a friend. When you came to Afghanistan everybody was waiting for America to help us build up our country. We were looking for you guys and we were very happy that you would come to our country. The people that hated you were very few, but you just grabbed guys like me. Look at me. Our very happiness, you turned it to bitterness. I am still not mad at you guys, but in the future try to know the difference between your enemy and your friend.”
Another eloquent critic was Haji Shahzada, a village elder in Kandahar province, who was seized with two villagers who had been at his house at time. As I explained in 2011, “One of the men seized with him, Abdullah Khan, had sold Shahzada a dog, as both men were interested in dog-fighting (which had been banned by the Taliban), but he was regarded by the soldiers involved in the raid (and, subsequently, by US interrogators) as Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior figure in the Taliban. The problem with this scenario was not only that Khan was not Khairkhwa, but also that Khairkhwa had been in US custody since February 2002 and was held at Guantánamo.”
No fan of the Taliban, Shahzada, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, warned the US authorities at Guantánamo that capturing innocent people like him was a sure way of turning the population against the Americans. “This is just me you brought,” he said, “but I have six sons left behind in my country. I have ten uncles in my area that would be against you. I don’t care about myself. I could die here, but I have 300 male members of my family there in my country. If you want to build Afghanistan you can’t build it this way … I will tell anybody who asks me that this is oppression.”
In November 2003, the transfer of Afghans to Guantánamo ceased — and only a few dozen supposedly significant individuals, almost all from other countries, subsequently arrived at the prison from CIA “black sites” between 2004 and 2008.
Bagram: deaths and arbitrary detention
However, Bagram, always a brutal place, had become deadly by the end of 2002, when an innocent taxi driver, Dilawar, and Mullah Habibullah, who was apparently the brother of a Taliban commander, were both killed through the use of sustained stress positions.
Moreover, these were not the only deaths in US custody at the time. At a CIA “black site” outside Kabul — known as the Salt Pit or the Dark Prison — an alleged militant, Gul Rahman, died of hypothermia in November 2002, and, as I explained in an article in 2009, When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan, in 2003, “at least three more prisoners were murdered by Americans in three different forward operating bases.”
Securing an insight into how much this kind of behavior was damaging the US cause in Afghanistan, Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, the regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which was established, with funding from the US Congress, “to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women’s and children’s rights were protected,” told the journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark in 2003 that what his job actually entailed was registering complaints against the US military. “Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them,” he said. “Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who’ve been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails. People who have been arrested say they’ve been brutalized — the tactics used are beyond belief.”
Speaking anonymously, a government minister also complained, “Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability.”
When the flights to Guantánamo stopped, those who would have been sent to the prison in Cuba, numbering in their thousands, were held at Bagram instead, which continued to be a prison system that was “administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability.” When a list of those held at Bagram was published in January 2010, I published an annotated version of it, and also wrote two articles to accompany it, en led, Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List, and Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions, to demonstrate how it was as fundamentally lawless as Guantánamo.
After a US judge granted habeas corpus rights to foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, the Obama administration appealed and won, although it prompted President Obama to introduce cursory, Guantánamo-style reviews at the prison, which only served to demonstrate how the lawless innovations of the “war on terror” had so thoroughly permeated US wartime detention policy, as at Guantánamo (and also, of course, as in Iraq). However, control of the prison was soon handed over to the Afghan government, enabling the US government to wash its hands of everything that had happened there — although not to those who had been held there arbitrarily.
By this time, most of the Afghans held at Guantánamo had also been released, but thousands of Afghans — both those who supported or were members of the Taliban and, because of US incompetence, many who opposed the Taliban as well — had lost years of their lives in Guantánamo or Bagram, where they had often been dealt with brutally, and where they had always been treated as though international law and the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply.
The imprisonment of these men and boys — and their treatment — was a far cry from the kinds of actions that would win “hearts and minds” in Afghanistan, and, considered in conjunction with the massive loss of life through military action, and the rampant corruption facilitated by the US presence, helps to explain the US’s final defeat in Afghanistan. The future under the Taliban may well be bleak for many, but no one should be under any illusions that, for the most part, the US will be missed.
military commissions still don't work
we should close GITMO and give these alleged bad guys a regular trial, but unfortunately, the US government undermined its own case by detaining them lawlessly and torturing them
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation...to-stand-trialPretrial hearings for the man accused of planning and managing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and several alleged accomplices resumed here at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base this week after a year-plus pandemic pause. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men are charged in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. The new round of hearings are proceeding in much the same fashion as the 41 previous ones over the last decade, which is to say they are fractious, ponderous and without an end in sight. There is no date for the trial to start.
They're just trying to run out the clock, hoping COVID would've picked of some of the detainees.
the system is working as designed -- not at all
They know there is no way to get around the torture. These guys are in their 40s and 50s but maybe prison could kill them off earlier.
and now we're using information we got from people we tortured, in court. another astonishing self-administered wound.
the remorseless war on terror continues to demoralize the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/u...anamo-bay.htmlThe military judge presiding in the death penalty case of a man accused of orchestrating the U.S.S. Cole bombing has agreed to consider information obtained during the man’s torture by C.I.A. interrogators to support an argument in pretrial proceedings at Guantánamo Bay.
Defense lawyers cast the decision as the first time that a military judge at the war court is publicly known to have agreed to consider information obtained through the C.I.A. torture of a prisoner, and on Thursday they asked a higher court to reverse it.
Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. of the Army ruled on May 18 that prosecutors may invoke such information to be used narrowly, not necessarily for the truth of it, before a jury begins hearing a case.
“No court has ever sanctioned the use of torture in this way,” the defense lawyers wrote in their 20-page filing that asked a Pentagon panel, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, to intervene in the case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi prisoner awaiting trial at Guantánamo Bay. “No court has ever approved the government’s use of torture as a tool in discovery litigation” or as “a legitimate means of facilitating a court’s interlocutory fact-finding.”
apparently the torture ruling got overruled on appeal, but the courtroom shenanigans are some real Soviet type
secret trial proceedings, US government surveilled the defense
uncharged detainees approved for release?
we're gonna keep those, too.
The legal black hole at Gitmo is 20 years old
Cuchillas de Baracoa mountain range, Guanatanamo province, Cuba. Prisma by Dukas, via Getty
THE FOREVER-WAR PRISON at Guantanamo Bay began operations on Jan. 11, 2002, and within two years, it got a bit of company. In September 2003, near the detention facility, the CIA began building a series of black sites. It was less a redundancy than an extension of logic.
The Pentagon, over these past 20 years, has typically insisted on distinctions between Guantanamo and the CIA's black sites. Officials point out that no one is known to have been waterboarded at Guantanamo; and now—though not in September 2003—Guantanamo detainees have access to legal counsel, for all the good that does the 39 men still there. Guantanamo Bay was, as well, an acknowledged prison, unlike the black sites—not that that did much good for all the people locked inside Guantanamo, whose iden ies the Pentagon hid for years.
But for all the Pentagon objections, the CIA's heritage runs throughout Guantanamo. The CIA's logic for the black sites was the military's logic for Guantanamo: a place beyond the reach of the law. Guantanamo's interrogation procedures—snarling dogs, sexual assault, sleep deprivation, etc.—were cassette dubs of stereophonically brutal CIA torture techniques. CIA medical personnel at the black sites kept detainees alive for another round of torture. Military medical personnel at Guantanamo administer force feedings that detainees describe as torture, all to keep detainees from embarrassing the United States by dying in captivity.
Most importantly, Guantanamo and the black sites imprison many of the same people—men like Majid Khan and Abu Zubaydah, for whom CIA captivity was relatively brief and military captivity relatively extensive. Early in the War on Terror, the CIA, fearful of exposure, wondered what would become of several of the people it tortured too extensively to release. For many, the answer has been Guantanamo.
CIA counterterrorism personnel liked to give their Guantanamo torture chambers cute names derived from Beatles songs, as if they weren't the cruel, ignorant servants of power that John Lennon hated. One of the black sites they called Penny Lane, and there they turned prisoners into assets. They called another one Strawberry Fields, the New York Times explained, "after CIA officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, 'forever.'"
Guantanamo Bay began its incarnation as a forever prison 20 years ago Tuesday. It predated the CIA's black sites by months and outlasted them by over a decade. What is Guantanamo, if not the black sites persisting?
https://foreverwars.substack.com/p/g...ever-war-biden
2/3 haven't been charged with anything twenty years later.
a big problem here is the number of remaining detainees from Yemen, about half. Yemen has no functioning government with which the US can negotiate release.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/u...-approved.htmlThe last 39 detainees at the prison fall into three groups: nine who are held as law-of-war detainees, the 18 who are approved for transfer and a dozen who have been charged with war crimes, two of whom have been convicted.
Sentence served, still in prison.
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