Category Archives: Guantanamo

You know things are bad when even the prosecutor complains the court is stacked against the defense. That’s how bad it was (is) at Gitmo: Two Prosecutors Faulted Trials for Detainees:

As the Pentagon was making its final preparations to begin war crimes trials against four detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, two senior prosecutors complained in confidential messages last year that the trial system had been secretly arranged to improve the chance of conviction and to deprive defendants of material that could prove their innocence. …

Among the striking statements in the prosecutors’ messages was an assertion by one that the chief prosecutor had told his subordinates that the members of the military commission that would try the first four defendants would be “handpicked” to ensure that all would be convicted.

The same officer, Capt. John Carr of the Air Force, also said in his message that he had been told that any exculpatory evidence – information that could help the detainees mount a defense in their cases – would probably exist only in the 10 percent of documents being withheld by the Central Intelligence Agency for security reasons.

Captain Carr’s e-mail message also said that some evidence that at least one of the four defendants had been brutalized had been lost and that other evidence on the same issue had been withheld.

Note that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts recently ruled that the executive branch could pretty much do what it likes in Gitmo.

Update: is it time to rethink the T-shirt?

Reading this item, JURIST – Paper Chase: UPDATE ~ US House members report improved conditions at Gitmo…

After visiting the Guantanamo Bay detention center Saturday [JURIST report], House Republicans and Democrats reported that conditions at the facility are improving. The lawmakers traveled to the detention facility to witness interrogations and observe living conditions of the suspected terrorists. Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) [official website] said that “[t]he Guantanamo we saw today is not the Guantanamo we heard about a few years ago”. The visits come amid mounting pressure from human rights groups and some lawmakers to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding conditions at the camp [JURIST news archive], and end the use of torture techniques. A Senate visit is scheduled for Sunday. AP has more

… reminds me of this item from the Washington Post last April, Detainee Questioning Was Faked, Book Says; U.S. Military Denies Staging Interviews:

The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.

Former Army Sgt. Erik Saar said the military chose detainees for the mock interrogations who previously had been cooperative and instructed them to repeat what they had told interrogators in earlier sessions, according to an interview with the CBS television program “60 Minutes,” which is slated to air Sunday night.

Kinda makes it hard to know how seriously to take these Congressional visits, doesn't it.

Irrelevant news article: Rumsfeld Nixes Independent Panel on Gitmo.

Captives plead for release in personal notes to court. Today's Miami Herald has an interesting story on the receipt by the US District Court for the District of Columbia of a batch of handwritten, sometimes one paragraph, petitions for help from Guantanamo detainees. The court docketed some of them, treating them as petitions for writs of mandamus, and has yet to take action on others. The article includes a nice discussion of the representation issue — will the petitioners represent themselves (which is a practical impossibility under the circumstances), or will the court appoint counsel and if so how.

In the latest twist in the Guantánamo Bay legal struggle, 16 war-on-terror prisoners ranging from a self-described nomadic shepherd to a disabled 78-year-old Afghan man are suing the U.S. government — acting as their own attorneys from behind the razor wire at Camp Delta in Cuba.

The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., docketed the cases on May 3 after a series of single-paragraph pleas from captives arrived in the court's mail.

The latest suits are extraordinary because the 16 captives wrote to the court directly, without benefit of a lawyer, from their prison camp 1,300 miles away. Further, some of the prisoners suing on their own are illiterate.

''My wish from you is please inquire about my sad story. I've been detained here unlawfully and sinlessly,'' writes Sharbat-Khan, age unknown, the self-described shepherd who said he lost 300 sheep and 10 camels when he was captured in Afghanistan and sent to the base in Cuba.

…

The 16 captives dictated their pleas to military payroll linguists at Guantánamo, according to military sources, who translated them and submitted them to military censorship.

Officers then sent them to the court by certified U.S. mail, along with 16 others, still unfiled, that arrived this week.