Gitmo Hearings Long Outed as Farce (Cohen / WaPo)

[struggle4progress]

by Andrew Cohen

Despite front-page coverage in The New York Times, it is not exactly news that our military officials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba employed flawed and biased screening processes to classify terror suspects down there. We have known for at least one year about the surreal nature of our government's "due process" offered to detainees thanks to a devastating report by a brilliant and dogged father and son lawyer team that studied the raw transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

We have long known, therefore, that military officials, to use the words of William Glaberson in this morning's Times, "relied on incomplete and outdated information" and that they were "under intense pressure from their commanders to conclude that the detainees should be held." The only bit of news here is that one of the officials who participated in these kangaroo courts finally had the courage and the integrity to step forward and speak out about a "haphazard and arbitrary" practice that surely is beneath us as a nation. Will this round of stories be enough to finally get the White House to close Gitmo? Who knows. The more important question is: will this information help convince Congress and the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, that the executive branch simply is incapable in this instance of following its legal obligations.

The reserve officer, Stephen E. Abraham, told the Times that "in very few instances would you find very specific information from which you could conclude he was an enemy combatant." Unfortunately, this stubborn fact did not preclude our military, in our name, from classifying as combatants hundreds of men, including hundreds who never fired a shot in anger at the US or otherwise were linked to Al Qaeda. And, of course, that classification has meant years and years of detention for those men. News? Hardly. Abraham is merely confirming and giving a face to the narrative that has been out there, for all to see, since the first days of the second term of the Bush Administration.

I wrote about this ghastly practice in January 2005 in a case involving a man named Mustafa Ait Idr, whose case somehow made it to a federal court. Here is what I wrote: "The presiding tribunal officer accuses Idr of associating 'with a known Al Qaeda operative.' The detainee says, reasonably enough: 'Give me his name.' The tribunal president says: 'I do not know.' Idr understandably asks: 'How can I respond to this?' The tribunal president asks: 'Did you know of anybody that was a member of al Qaeda?' Idr says: 'No, no ...' And then Idr went to the heart of the constitutional problem, as Judge Green sees it, with an evaluation that the judge described as 'piercingly accurate.' ~snip~

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2007/06/gitmo_hearing_long_outed_as_fa.html?hpid=news-col-blogs

[OregonBlue]

1. If they were classified as enemy combatants, how come so many have been or are being sent home now?

Can't have it both ways. Either they had evidence that proved they were dangerous, or they never were and can now safely be sent back to their countries. Haven't many been released AFTER they were designated enemy combatants?