skippy the bush kangaroo: the tyrant's writ

Friday, July 27, 2007

the tyrant's writ

officer calls guantanamo reviews a sham

washington — lt. col. stephen abraham, a military intelligence officer, spent six months at the department of defense working in the office that reviews the government's cases against detainees held at guantanamo bay, cuba.

on thursday, he became the first military insider to urge congress to scrap the military-run reviews conducted on the island and give detainees access to u.s. courts. he described the reviews, known as combatant status review tribunals, as "designed not to ascertain the truth, but to legitimize the detentions." […]

abraham described a system of sham trials, "an effort to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the detentions, to launder decisions already made." he said the reviewers were provided with "vague, generalized data" from unknown sources that made it impossible to decide whether a detainee should be classified as an enemy combatant. the reviewers also were constantly prodded to speed up the process, he said.

you know, it's only when you judge the gitmo trials by western standards of due process and justice that they look like haunting, corrosive tragedies. if you think about the long history of show trials in the west - the star chamber, the generals of the battle of the arginusae, the dreyfus affair, then aWol's show trials seem normal fare. it's just a question of standards and values.

posted by Pudentilla at 5:11 AM |

1 Comments:

Hey there Skippy, I know a lawyer who went down to Gitmo as an advocate for one of the detainees. He was appalled not so much by the conditions as by the opacity of the entire process of detainment. Amazingly enough he wore this tshirt down there and wasn't compelled to remove it:

http://tshirtinsurgency.com/guantanamo-bay-t-shirt

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