The Best They Can Do

If you'd listen to Bush/Cheney you'd hear that we only have the worst of the worst locked up at Guatanamo. Then they cherry picked from the crowd locked up to present their best case for that claim for a public trial. It took them 5 years to figure out which one was the worst of the worst of the worst, but they picked one.

They gave him a trial. With a military judge and military lawyers and a jury of military officers hand-picked by the Pentagon.

They did not find him guilty of all charges, although they did find him guilty of one minor charge. The government asked for a 30 sentence. They got a 5 1/2 year sentence. With credit for time served he should be released before Christmas.

But now we're saying we don't care, we're not going to release him even when he's served his sentence.

What a country. What a President.


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Simple Justice has some things to say about the sentence.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars is stunned.

By Thursday, the Solicitor General is expected to file a petition with the US Supreme Courtexplaining why the the United States should lock people up indefinitely on the sayso of some Afgan tribal chief without access to courts, a defense, or without making any kind of criminal charges. I assume the brief will refer directly to private conversations between Bush and God authorizing the behavior.

Contraband skivvies

This is just too funny for comment.

Guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp found two prisoners sporting unauthorized underwear, and the U.S. military is investigating to determine how they got the contraband.

They hate us for our freedoms

From Balkinization

Last fall, Majid Khan was at the center of an amazing piece of litigation: his lawyers filed a motion demanding that they be allowed to see him, and the government opposed it, claiming that the meeting might lead to the disclosure of classified methods of acquiring information. In other words, Majid Khan might tell his lawyers what his captors did to him.

Read the post.

In another post he points out that torture doesn't become something else just because we call it "red turtle" or whatever phrase the Republican candidates for President prefer.

What does Rule of Law mean?

One Navy lawyer thought the Rule of Law meant that our government is supposed to follow the law and respect the legal rights of the accused.

That quaint notion has already cost him his career (18 years in the Navy) and may well cost him a few years in the brig.

06:03 PM CDT on Thursday, May 17, 2007
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
begerton@dallasnews.com

NORFOLK, Va. – Matt Diaz was a Navy lawyer with 18 years of military experience when duty called at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Six months there broke him.

Navy officer Matt Diaz put his career on the line when he disclosed the names of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a civil liberties group. Now, in a case that reflects the fierce dissent within the U.S. government over the war on terrorism, the lieutenant commander faces a court-martial that could send him to prison for at least 14 years. A jury convicted him late Thursday, and the sentencing phase of the case is set to begin Friday.

Cmdr. Diaz is on trial because of actions he took after concluding – as many of higher rank have – that the Bush administration's offshore detention camp for terrorism suspects was making a mockery of American justice.

"My oath as a commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United States," Cmdr. Diaz told The Dallas Morning News in his first public comments on the case. "I'm not a criminal."

In early 2005, as he was concluding a six-month tour of duty as a Guantanamo legal adviser, Cmdr. Diaz sent an anonymous note to a New York civil liberties group containing the names of the detainees.

He thought he was doing the right thing. He thought he was following the law because he was a lawyer and thought that the US Supreme Court was the supreme law of the land. Turns out he was wrong about that.

The Center for Constitutional Rights had earlier won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that terrorism suspects had the right to challenge their detention. But the Pentagon was refusing to identify the men, hampering the group's effort to represent them.

"I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles we continued to place in the way of the attorneys," the 41-year-old officer said. "I knew my time was limited. … I had to do something."

In doing so, the government contends, Cmdr. Diaz committed a variety of crimes, including disobeying regulations and transmitting secret defense information that "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation." The jury convicted him on four of five counts.

This is just disgusting.

Detainees

Here's a summery of the trail of the first guy at Gitmo to go through the new Military Tribunal system. It looks just like what the government has always told us a Cuban trial is like.

I particularly like the part where his plea agreement required a recant of previous statements about mistreatment and forbids him to talk to the press for a year.