BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Officials: Gitmo court system likely to stay open

Monday, May 4th, 2009

By LARA JAKES |

The Obama administration may revamp and restart the Bush-era military trial system for suspected terrorists as it struggles to determine the fate of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and fulfill a pledge to close the prison by January.

The move would further delay terrorism trials and, coupled with recent comments by U.S. military and legal officials, amounts to a public admission by President Barack Obama’s team that delivering on that promise is easier said than done.

Almost immediately after taking office, Obama suspended the tribunal system and ordered a 120-day review of the cases against the 241 men being held at the Navy prison in Cuba. That review was supposed to end May 20. But two U.S. officials said Saturday the administration wants a three-month extension.

The delay means that legal action on the detainees’ cases would continue to be frozen. Neither of the U.S. officials were authorized to discuss the delay publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

One official said the Obama administration planned to use the extra time to ask Congress to tweak the existing military tribunals system that was created for the detainees. Critics of former President George W. Bush, who pushed Congress to create it, have said the system violated U.S. law because it limits the detainees’ legal rights.

Now, faced with looming deadlines and few answers for where to transfer the detainees, the Obama administration may keep the tribunal system — with a few changes.

Asked at a Senate hearing last week if the administration would abandon the Guantanamo system, Defense Secretary Robert Gates answered: “Not at all.”

“The commissions are very much still on the table,” Gates said, adding that nine Guantanamo detainees are already being tried in military tribunals.

Gates also alluded to the administration’s likely request for Congress to tweak to law that created the Guantanamo legal system.

“Should there be any changes to the military commission law, if the decision is made to retain the military commissions?” he asked rhetorically.

Attorney General Eric Holder went further at a recent House hearing, saying the military commissions still could be used but “would be different from those that were previously in place.”

Although as many as one-third of the detainees will be released or sent to other nations for trial, Holder said the administration is considering how to prosecute the rest of them.

“We’ll be making, again, individualized determinations about where — for that group of people who should be tried, where they should be tried,” Holder testified. Among the options he described were “military tribunals that have significant changes made to the manner in which they would be conducted.”

The administration has never dismissed the possibility of using the tribunal system to try the suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and other foreign fighters swept up and ultimately held at Guantanamo after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But administration officials have said they hoped to try many in U.S. federal courts, relying on civilian prosecutors instead of on the military law.

Among the planned changes to the law, both officials said Saturday, would be limits on the evidence used against the detainees. Much of the evidence compiled against at least some of the detainees is classified and cannot be used in civilian courts without exposing the secret material.

The potential 90-day delay was first reported in Saturday’s editions of The New York Times. Human rights and civil liberties groups immediately criticized the idea.

“To revive a fatally flawed system that was specifically designed to evade due process and the rule of law would be a grave error and a huge step backward,” Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Since Obama ordered the prison closed, Republicans have seized on the issue of where the detainees will go — and the new Democratic administration lack of a plan to deal with them.

“Closing Guantanamo is not a good option if no safe alternatives exist,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement Saturday.

Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University legal ethics professor, said the dilemma highlights differences between campaign rhetoric and the realities of the courtroom.

“Once you become president and see the whole panoply of issued that you face, some of the things that seemed easy to promise or talk about during the campaign sometimes appear more difficult,” Rothstein said Saturday. “Elections are fought on big slogans without much nuance or detail. I think we want a president who responds to what he sees when he actually gets in there and sees the whole picture, rather than one who adheres rigidly to what he said before.”

Source: AP News

Have Your Say: Officials: Gitmo court system likely to stay open
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

The compulsive liars in blue

Monday, May 4th, 2009

IT’S NOT the violence of the police that gives away their nature–it’s the systematic compulsive Bart Simpson-style lying.

They could be caught on film battering someone with a cricket bat, and in seconds, they’d issue a statement that went, “I didn’t do it. He was already dead when we got here this morning. He was a commander with the Taliban. He pointed a nuclear missile at me. He shouted, ‘I’m going to blow up the universe.’ He’s the Devil. That’s it, we’ve checked his DNA file, and he’s the Devil.”

A similar attitude was evident before the recent G20 protests in Britain, when the police–not individual policeman, but spokesmen for the police as a body–issued endless statements that suggested they were getting pumped up like American wrestlers before a television battle.

If they’d had a couple more days, they’d have got a chief inspector in a vest to flex his biceps, lean into a camera and growl, “Now listen up, April 1st is gonna be Judgment Day. I gotta message for you protest punks, when I’m through, it ain’t gonna be climate change botherin’ you, it’ll be the change in the shape of yo ugly ass. Grrrrrr.”

Every time someone dies as a result of police behavior, from Hillsborough to Stockwell to the G20, these creative lies pour forth, before crucial footage goes magically missing from their records. So maybe it would be fair if criminals were allowed a similar privilege.

After a bank robbery they could hold a press conference, and announce they had confidential information that the bank was laundering money to the IRA, and Mrs. McGinty, the bank clerk, had vaulted over the safe carrying what appeared to be a flame-thrower, so faced with a split-second decision, the gang had no alternative but to tie her to a chair and blow up the safe.

Despite the lies, little action is taken against them, and senior politicians make speeches such as, “We must not forget the police do a magnificent job in horrendously evil circumstances, and to stop them from lying would be to remove one of their most valuable tools in the fight against those people who want to burn down your house.”

And then they’re investigated by another branch of the police, which has as much chance of producing an impartial outcome as if the FA allowed all Manchester United’s matches to be refereed by Alex Ferguson.

This is why the issue is about more than individual “hot-headed” policemen. No other profession would be protected like this. If a pharmacist went berserk, you wouldn’t get the head of Britain’s pharmacist making a statement like “The pharmacist observed Mr. Winthrop lurking suspiciously by the Lemsips, and felt he had no choice but to administer six shots to the head from his .22-caliber pistol in order to protect the public. Obviously, he regrets the loss of life incurred now that it has been established that the deceased was seeking a remedy for his cold, but it would be quite wrong to criticize this brave pharmacist for carrying out his duty.”

It seems the police are trained to behave like this, which is why they’ve been like it for decades, with the difference now that with modern gadgets, their actions get caught on film.

Which is why the civil liberties groups are wrong, and the police are right about the need for more and more closed-circuit television surveillance cameras. We do need more of them. The only thing is most of them should be pointed at the police.

First published in the Independent.

Have Your Say: The compulsive liars in blue
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Obama administration indicates military commission trials to resume

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Recent statements by top Obama administration officials and reports in the New York Times and Washington Post indicate that President Barack Obama plans to resume the system of military commission trials for some Guantánamo prisoners.

The articles, which are based on anonymous White House sources, and statements by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder appear designed to prepare public opinion for a revival of the trials, which were temporarily suspended in an order issued by Obama on the day of his inauguration. The suspension is due to end May 20.

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday, Gates was asked whether the Guantánamo military commission system would be shut down, to which he responded, “not at all,” and added that “the commissions are very much still on the table.”

At a news conference last week, Holder said that “it may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.”

The Times and Post articles, published Saturday and Sunday, respectively, broadly indicate that military commission trials would be used for some of the 241 prisoners still held at Guantánamo.

New trials would likely be preceded by a congressional revision of the Military Tribunal Act of 2006, which sanctioned, with substantial Democratic support, the Guantánamo system of drumhead military courts. The purpose of such a change would be to lend the trials a veneer of legal legitimacy, while overcoming obstacles that prevented the Bush administration from obtaining convictions.

In congressional testimony last week, Holder said any new military commission trials “would be different from those that were previously in place” and would have “significant changes made to the manner in which they would be conducted.” The determination of whether to try detainees in US courts or in military tribunals would be decided on a case-by-case basis, Holder said.

In his testimony, Gates raised such changes rhetorically, asking, “Should there be any changes to the military commission law, if the decision is made to retain the military commissions?”

According an anonymous official cited by the Post, Obama will likely ask for a three-month delay in the scheduled resumption of military commission proceedings. The Post said the administration “planned to use the extra time” to ask Congress to “tweak” the Military Commission Act.

Obama finds himself in a quandary. Administration officials fear that prosecutions in the US court system could, according to the Times, founder because judges “could make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.”

In other words, the evidence which the government wishes to use against detainees is fatally tainted by the use of torture or by its hearsay character. Such “evidence” is disallowed in any civilian court that adheres to minimal principles of due process laid down by the US Constitution and by statute.

As the Times notes, such evidence “is central to many Guantánamo cases because they are based on intelligence reports and detainees may never be permitted to cross-examine the sources of those reports.”

Another problem for the administration in allowing cases to be heard in civilian courts is the possibility of more public revelations of the torture methods employed by the US government as well as the exposure of connections between alleged terrorists and US intelligence agencies.

The administration continues to explore other avenues. Ongoing efforts to find third-party nations willing to accept the Guantánamo inmates have largely failed.

In his Congressional testimony, Gates said the Obama administration might seek to place up to 100 of the Guantánamo inmates in US prisons without trial or judicial review. The administration has asked Congress to appropriate $50 million to construct new domestic prisons for terror suspects it claims cannot be tried in federal courts.

Human rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First were quick to raise objections to any resuscitation of the military tribunals. Jonathan Hafetz, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney, interviewed by the internet site Public Record, called military commissions a “failed experiment in lawlessness,” adding, “the only reason to perpetuate to military commissions in any form would be to circumvent the protections of the criminal justice system and insulate torture and other abuses from review.”

Francis A. Boyle, a professor at the University of Illinois law school and a specialist in international laws of war, called military tribunals “kangaroo courts” that “violate the Geneva Conventions and are thus a war crime.” He added, “There is no way they can be reformed.”

According to Boyle, the Geneva Conventions “require the use of regular, organized courts, which in this case would mean prosecution in United States Federal District Courts or else prosecution by means of formal US military court-martial proceedings with all the protections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. To do otherwise is a war crime.”

Obama’s moves toward continuing the Guantánamo military commission trials is the latest exposure of his rhetoric about “change” and his pretense of breaking with the anti-democratic practices of the Bush administration.

When Obama ran for president, he repeatedly pledged to shut down the Guantánamo prison camp, which he called a “legal black hole.” Obama said he would “reject the Military Commissions Act,” and try terror detainees in the US court system. Then, in his January 20 executive order, issued to great media fanfare, Obama temporarily suspended ongoing cases in the military tribunal system.

His evident moves to revive the tribunals follow the decision to release four Bush administration Office of the Legal Counsel memos justifying torture, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU. In the face of denunciations from the Republican Party and the national security apparatus, Obama has promised that there will be no investigations of Bush administration officials who ordered torture, or the CIA operatives who carried it out.

The fundamental reason that Obama now seeks to make use of the military tribunal system is that his administration, no less than that of Bush, is an instrument of American imperialism.

The military tribunal system, along with torture, grew out of a more fundamental criminal act: the launching of illegal and aggressive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These illegal wars enjoyed the support of the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as the media. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a recent Perspective, “far from being an accidental or excessive byproduct, torture was an essential component in creating the web of lies and disinformation that allowed these wars to proceed.”

The centrality of the launching of aggressive war to other war crimes was established in the Nuremburg trials of Germany’s Nazi leadership in the wake of World War II. The victorious Allies who oversaw the trials defined this as the crime of crimes, from which all others flowed.

Obama is committed to carrying on the illegal war in Iraq and has escalated the war in Afghanistan and expanded it to neighboring Pakistan—like Bush, all in the name of fighting terrorism. It follows from this policy that Obama will not relinquish the anti-democratic and criminal methods of “the war on terror.”

Tom Eley

Have Your Say: Obama administration indicates military commission trials to resume
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

US accused of violating its amnesty in Iraq

Monday, May 4th, 2009

US-allied anti-Qaeda militia leader says his arrest violates amnesty deal with Americans.

BALAD, Iraq - A senior anti-Qaeda militia leader allied with American forces said on Monday that his arrest was a violation of an amnesty deal signed with the United States last year.

Iraqi police and the US military detained Mullah Nadim al-Juburi and his two brothers on Saturday at their home near Balad in central Iraq on charges of “terrorism”.

Speaking from an interior ministry prison in Balad, Juburi, a former Qaeda leader, said he had severed his relationship with the group in May last year after signing an immunity deal with the US military.

“We signed a ceasefire agreement with American forces, just as we signed an agreement to grant us immunity from the courts, even if we killed half the American army or shot down a plane,” he said in an interview.

“The case has been raised because I was in armed groups before… The complaints have been raised against us because we were in armed groups falsely accused of killing and kidnapping.”

After Juburi formed a Sahwa or Awakening militia to help US forces fight insurgents, he became a target of Al-Qaeda, surviving several assasination attempts, according to Iraqi police.

The Sahwa movement began in late 2006 when local tribes and former insurgents or Al-Qaeda members started turning on Al-Qaeda in Iraq and allying with the US military, and today it includes more than 90,000 fighters across the country.

In recent months dozens of Sahwa members have been arrested amid warnings from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that they have no immunity from the law.

American and Iraqi forces arrested Juburi and two of his brothers on Saturday night at their home in Dhuluiyah.

“We received an order to arrest Mullah Nadim al-Juburi and his two brothers from the court of appeal for Salaheddin province in Tikrit,” Balad police colonel Jabbar Abed Oun said.

“He has been accused of the crimes of kidnapping and murder and is wanted by the anti-terrorism police in Tikrit,” he said.

Have Your Say: US accused of violating its amnesty in Iraq
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .