Bush Wins Legal Victory Over Guantanamo Detainees

[Jcrowley]

President Bush's victory is a defeat for American honor

February 23, 2007
By TOM TEEPEN Cox Newspapers

President Bush has won a signal legal victory. He should be ashamed of it. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has upheld the administration's contention that prisoners the administration is holding at Guantanamo — some 400, reportedly — cannot challenge their detentions in federal courts.

That leaves their fate up to Bush's personal whim or to military tribunals set up by the administration and recent Republican Congresses so as to offer little hope to detainees picked up, often willly-nilly, as long as five years ago as suspected "enemy combatants."

The prisoners can be doomed by coerced testimony — testimony produced by torture, to be plain about it — and by hearsay, permissions granted last year in the Military Commissions Act, which in those and other ways deeply degraded the U.S. military's once proud system of justice.

The appellate ruling will be further appealed to the Supreme Court, but even if the justices take it up — big if — relief is unlikely. The high court has twice in recent years ruled that the Guantanamo prisoners may indeed challenge their status in federal courts, but only in the absence of a contrary congressional directive of the sort last year's legislation set out.

<snip>

So here's the way matters stand in Bush-world:
A president may declare a war just by his rhetoric — Bush could as easily have called his "war on terrorism" a "drive against terrorism." He can then order the detention of "enemy combatants," designated as such by whatever criteria he declares, and finally imprison them indefinitely without recourse to any court. The "war" and the president's extraordinary powers will run for as long as the president says — and remember, Bush said we might not even recognize when this one ends.

<snip>

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070223/OPINION03/702230311/1039/OPINION03

http://greenberg-art.com/.Toons/.Toons,%20social/qqxsgLibertyCries.gif

[malaise]

1. When will Congress act to stop these

war criminals.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. I hope that the Torturer in Chief is happy

because his happiness is surely going to be short lived

[bdamomma]

3. this maniac has too much power.

now what just let those at Gitmo just rot, Bush couldn't care less about those who are there.

[Jcrowley]

4. Guantánamo inmates ‘driven insane’

Guantánamo inmates ‘driven insane’
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: January 10 2007 20:00 | Last updated: January 10 2007 20:00
Prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba are being driven insane by a tightening of conditions and the situation of their indefinite detention without trial, according to lawyers and rights activists involved with the US camp.

The lawyers and activists also doubt whether the Bush administration intends to carry out its stated desire to close the facility. Protesters around the world plan to mark Thursday’s fifth anniversary of the first delivery of detainees to Guantánamo with demonstrations calling for its closure. American anti-war activists and at least one former British prisoner intend to march to the perimeter of the US-held enclave in eastern Cuba.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says the isolation regime at Guantánamo has tightened in recent months, piling the mental pressure on inmates who have “no fair procedure” that would lead to possible release.

Mr Roth told the Financial Times he had proposed to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and chairman of the European Union presidency, that EU member states offered to take some of the detainees who cannot return to their home countries for fear of torture. In exchange the US would offer a concrete closure plan that would lead to trials, preferably before a court martial, of remaining prisoners.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1945c100-a0e4-11db-acff-0000779e2340.html

[Jcrowley]

5. America tortures (yawn)

Well, why not? Thanks to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, "extraordinary renditions" and "black sites," many people now take for granted the image of the American as torturer. At least 100 prisoners have been killed while in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many more have been beaten, humiliated and abused. Still others have been secretly handed over to our even less-scrupulous friends in various Middle Eastern intelligence services. And though the vast majority of our troops and officials abide by both the spirit and the letter of U.S. and international laws, such abusive tactics have been authorized by officials at the highest level of the U.S. government.

In November 2001, 66% of Americans said they "could not support government-sanctioned torture of suspects" as part of the war on terrorism. And when photos of abuses at Abu Ghraib surfaced in the spring of 2004, the U.S. news media treated it — rightly — as a major scandal. In October 2005, the U.S. Senate voted 90-9 in support of legislation prohibiting the inhumane treatment of prisoners, sponsored by Arizona Sen. John McCain.

But over the last year, we seem to have lost our former sense of outrage, though prisoner abuse has hardly ended. A handful of low-ranking people have been convicted for their roles in abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, but the bigger fish carry on as usual. In September, President Bush gave a speech defending the use of "alternative" interrogation methods; a poll shortly after that found public opposition to torture was down to 56%. In October, Congress obligingly passed the Military Commissions Act, which permits the use of coerced testimony in trials of suspected enemy combatants and restricts the ability of U.S. courts to examine allegations of abuse.

Lately, news relating to torture has been greeted by a collective yawn. On Jan. 31, German prosecutors issued a warrant for the arrest of 13 CIA operatives involved in the illegal abduction of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who was taken to Afghanistan for a little "alternative" interrogation — and then unceremoniously abandoned in Albania when the CIA realized that it had grabbed the wrong guy. On Feb. 16, an Italian court indicted 26 U.S. intelligence operatives and contractors accused of kidnapping an Islamic cleric and taking him to Egypt, where, he says, he was tortured.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks23feb23,0,1261650.column?coll=la-home-commentary