It was edited.So, in this case, this detainee was arrested in Pakistan on December 15th, 2001. This was in the middle of a five-day battle between US forces and Osama bin Laden’s fighters in Tora Bora, in a cave complex in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan, where Uthman was arrested. You know, in the original opinion, Kennedy noted that. He said it was, you know, unrebutted; both sides agreed. Both the government and the detainee himself acknowledged that he was detained by Pakistani authorities in Pakistan. The opinion vanishes. The new one comes out. All of a sudden, the judge writes that the detainee acknowledges—he, himself, admits that he was arrested in late December 2001 near Tora Bora. He has moved the location of the detainee’s arrest, the date of his arrest, to a different country, weeks later, moving him closer, really, to where bin Laden was believed to have been and where he was believed to have been fleeing. So, in the opinion that the public sees, he suddenly looks far more threatening, far more like an al-Qaeda fighter, like a bin Laden bodyguard, and far less the appearance that the judge originally claimed him to have been, which is somebody who had turned himself in to authorities in Pakistan weeks earlier.
So, we went in, blew up a bunch of things and people, and set up the basic machinery of government - which in this case, is about as modern as a waterwheel because there's so little infrastructure there. And we took a bunch of prisoners: either because we caught them with their pants weapons down and had no immediate reason to shoot them, or because we thought they could tell us something useful. The primary reason we still have them in custody is because we have not found anyone who can accept our surrender, and we have no clear idea of how to conclude matters without an awkward loss of face (the kind that encourages nutjobs to take another crack at us by attacking a bunch of defenseless civilians).OH NO, NOT A SERIOUS LOSS OF FACE?
We (as in Western civilization rather than just the USA) are horrified by fanatical Islamists because they do things straight out of the history books like cutting people's heads off or stoning them to death, what the fuck.On the other hand, sexually abusing prisoners, and beating them to death never goes out of style! Hell, throwing them in a box with insects is downright innovative! And what could be more modern then killing people with hellfire missile armed robots!
the fact that every single attempt to move these guys to the continental US or get an actual trial going has been met with an outbreak of incontinence followed by furious refusal; and the fact that past problems like this were usually solved by the most expedient method followed by a long official silence.What the fuck does that even mean? Only reason these people can't be brought to the U.S. is because Obama is more interested in not hurting anyone's feelings then any sort of justice. If people refuse to transfer them, fire them, and replace them with people who follow orders. If there's no reliable evidence that can be used to convict someone, release them. Why should potentially innocent people be kept in prison for life on the basis of tortured evidence?
All of this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal: to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison. They'll create various procedures to prettify the process, but the outcome is always the same -- ongoing detention for as long as the President dictates. This is how I described it when Obama first unveiled his proposal of preventive detention:If you really think about the argument Obama made yesterday -- when he described the five categories of detainees and the procedures to which each will be subjected -- it becomes manifest just how profound a violation of Western conceptions of justice this is. What Obama is saying is this: we'll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don't think we can convict in a real court, we'll get convictions in the military commissions I'm creating. For those we can't convict even in my military commissions, we'll just imprison them anyway with no charges ("preventively detain" them).After yesterday, we have to add an even more extreme prong to this policy: if by chance we miscalculate and deign to give a trial to a detainee who is then acquitted, we'll still just keep them in prison anyway by presidential decree.
As I said at the outset, because it was a war. We didn't dust for fingerprints, run down an ID, pick up a warrant and then send the guys from Law and Order to feel their collars. Some soldiers came around a rocky outcrop, there was an exchange of gunfire, various people (mostly theirs) ended up badly wounded or dead, and we grabbed one guy here, one guy there because they found themselves out of ammo and cut off from any escape route.Also, if you'd spent any amount of time thinking about this, you would see that it would be easy to get a conviction, when police get into a shootout, they don't have any trouble getting convictions, because they can testify themselves. Getting convictions against people like this in court would be easy.
Think: the OJ Simpson case. Criminal trial vs. civil trial outcomes.What? You can't sue someone into jail. What the fuck does that have to do with locking people up?
To try and answer you questions. Not wanting a discussion on the right or wrong of either case.
More than one; detention for the foreseeable future (sans torture) isn't considered an egregious human rights violation.Are you literally insane?
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posted by absalom at 3:17 PM on October 13, 2010 [4 favorites]