Guantanamo is in Total Disarray

By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog.

Guantánamo is in total disarray.

Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo -- the unique system of trials for "terror suspects" that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers -- will be aware that their progress has been faltering at best. After six and a half years, in which they have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, derailed by their own military judges, relentlessly savaged by their own military defense lawyers, and condemned as politically motivated by their own former chief prosecutor, they have only secured one contentious result: a plea bargain negotiated by the Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing "material support for terrorism," and dropped his well-chronicled claims of torture and abuse by US forces, in order to secure his return to Australia to serve out the remainder of a meager nine-month sentence last March.

In the last few weeks, however, Cheney's dream has been souring at an even more alarming rate than usual. Following boycotts of pre-trial hearings in March and April by three prisoners -- Mohamed Jawad, Ahmed al-Darbi and Ibrahim al-Qosi -- the latest appearance by Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden, spread the words "boycott" and "Guantánamo" around the world.

Hamdan is no ordinary Guantánamo prisoner. It was his case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that shut down the Military Commissions' first incarnation in June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, a decision that forced the administration to press new legislation -- the Military Commissions Act -- through a sleeping Congress later that year.

But Hamdan's fame meant little to him on April 29, when he too decided to boycott his trial, telling Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the judge in his last pre-trial hearing before his trial is scheduled to begin, "The law is clear. The Constitution is clear. International law is clear. Why don't we follow the law? Where is the justice?"

For his part, Capt. Allred did not give up without attempting to persuade Hamdan that he should believe in the legal process before which he found himself. "You should have great faith in the law," he said. "You won. Your name is all over the law books." This was true, but it was little consolation for Hamdan, who was charged again as soon as the Commissions were revived in Congress. Nor could Capt. Allred's addendum -- "You even won the very first time you came before me" -- sway him, even though that too was true.

Last June, when Hamdan appeared before Capt. Allred for the first time, in the first pre-trial hearing for his new Military Commission, Allred dismissed the case, pointing out that the Military Commissions Act, which had revived the Commissions, applied only to "unlawful enemy combatants," whereas Hamdan, and every other prisoner in Guantánamo for that matter, had only been determined to be "enemy combatants" in the tribunals -- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals -- that had made them eligible for trial by Military Commission.

It was small wonder that Hamdan was despondent, however. Two months later, an appeals court reversed Allred's decision, and Hamdan -- twice a victor -- was charged once more, and removed from a privileged position in Guantánamo's Camp IV -- reserved for a few dozen compliant prisoners who live communally -- to Camp VI, where, like the majority of the prisoners, he has spent most of his time in conditions that amount to solitary confinement, and where, as his lawyers pointed out in February, his mental health has deteriorated significantly.

As he prepared to boycott proceedings, Hamdan had a few last questions for Capt. Allred. He asked the judge why the government had changed the law -- "Is it just for my case?" -- and responded to Allred's insistence that he would do everything he could to give him a fair trial by asking, "By what law will you try me?" When Allred replied that he would be tried under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan gave up. "But the government changed the law to its advantage," he said. "I am not being tried by the American law."

Col. Morris Davis condemns the Commissions (again)

Hamdan's eloquent and restrained explanation for his boycott was the most poignant event in his hearing, but it was not the most explosive. That accolade was reserved for Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Commissions, who resigned noisily last October, citing political interference in the process. Once the Commissions' stoutest supporter -- in 2006 he told reporters, "Remember if you dragged Dracula out into the sunlight he melted? Well, that's kind of the way it is trying to drag a detainee into the courtroom" -- Col. Davis explained his Damascene conversion in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in December. [more]

Iran: Cheney Reveals Paranoid Zeal

Many paranoids exhibit a mechanism called reaction formation. Unable to cope with their evil thoughts, they project their anxieties on others.

"Obviously, they're ... heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade levels," Cheney said in an interview with ABC television transcribed by the White House.

Once they hear such a lie, the viewers absorb it at least subliminally. The next time heard the lie becomes more palpable. Hammered into the brain daily backed by MSM, it becomes a well-known ‘fact’ readily disseminated among boob tube fans.

After WWII the USA imported Nazis adept in information control. They taught Madison Avenue, the National Security Agency and the Republicans [eventually] how to persuade the public of any nonsense at all.

Television grew with gas guzzlers, the Red Menace and fluoridated drinking water. The Feds set the limits on debate dummying down the school kids for three generations.

To many Americans born after 1946 the words such as ‘negotiation’ and ‘compromise’ are foreign concepts. “Send in the Marines” is the stock foreign policy.

“Kill them before they kill us” is the excuse.

Dick Cheney, Chocolate Bunnies and Sex Scandals

With all due respect to all of you with your Easter bonnets and chocolate bunnies, I think Dick Cheney is in Fat City. So? In the Congress who dares to oppose him on the surge. Thanks to our fine domestic spying service, he has the goods on every bed wetter, cross dresser and pervert on Capitol Hill. Who's left to mention the failure of the administration war policies?
Among the public, who cares? The war families are one percent of the population. Where was the mass media coverage for Winter Soldier? With 81% of our citizens tired of being in Iraq, one might expect a bigger audience for the event.
Eliot Spitzer got all the publicity. Cleverly, he played the sex scandal card establishing him as the man [cad] to beat in 2012 first in name recognition.
We don't care for a holier-than-thou pacifist. We want an in-yer-face varmint who shouts. "So?".

Winter Soldiers Reply to Cheney

A Few Winter Soldiers Speak

Reprints from Opednews

Cheney speaks on ABC’s Good Morning America

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

The Replies:

CAMILO MEJIA: My name is Camilo Mejia. I joined the military in 1995 as an infantryman, and I deployed to the Middle East in March of ’03, first to Jordan and then to Iraq in April of that same year.
…
I just—there was this blank space in my memory, which is a blank space that I have for other experiences, like this time when this child was basically riding in the passenger seat with his father, and we decapitated his father with a machinegun. And when we went down to the low ground to search for enemy wounded, I remember seeing this young person standing next to this body that was decapitated. And when I think about it, I cannot remember the expression on the child’s face. I cannot remember that he was a child. I only know this because people told me later on that was the man’s son, the man’s young son, who was standing next to the body.

And it’s because not only—it’s not enough to—to dehumanize the enemy by means of your military background or training or the indoctrination or the heat and the fatigue and the intensity of the environment, but there are times when it is so hard to deal with these experiences that I suppose your own body, your own psyche, in order to protect you from these memories and in order to protect you from losing your humanity, erases certain memories that are too painful to deal with, that are too overwhelming to deal with. And whether it is to punish the men in your squad or the men in your unit or to erase the face of a child whose father was decapitated next to him in a car at a traffic control point, or whether it is to pose next to a dead civilian or Iraqi or whoever, it is necessary to become dehumanized, because war is dehumanizing.

And we have a whole new generation—we have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over five million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead. We have close to 60,000 injured, both by combat injuries and non- combat injuries, coming back from this war. That’s not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. So all that just to say that war is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq.

So?

GEOFF MILLARD: My name is Geoff Millard. I’m the Washington, D.C. chapter president of Iraq Veterans Against the War. I spent nine years in the New York Army National Guard.
…
During a briefing that my unit, the 42nd Infantry Division Rear Operations Center at FOB Speicher, gave to General Casey, I heard him refer to the Iraqi people as hajis. I have heard several generals, including the 42nd Infantry Division Commander, General Taluto, and my own general that I worked for, Brigadier General Sullivan, use these terms in reference to the Iraqi people. These things start at the top, not at the bottom.

I have one story that I want to share with you. One of the most horrifying experiences of my tour that still stays with me was during a briefing that I gave. It was actually in the early summer of 2005. For those who have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, we know that a year becomes a month, a month becomes a day, and a day becomes a second, a second that repeats over and over and over again, not just for your tour, but the rest of your life. So I wish I could name the exact date, but unfortunately that day has become a second that has repeated and repeated and repeated.

But on a day in the early summer of 2005 in the area of operation of the 42nd Infantry Division, there was a traffic control point shooting. Traffic control point shootings are rather common in Iraq; they happen on a near or daily basis. What happened was, a vehicle was driving very quickly towards a traffic control point. A young machine gunner made the split-second decision that that vehicle was a threat, and in less than a minute put 200 rounds from his .50-caliber machinegun into that vehicle. That day, he killed a mother, a father and two children. The boy was age four, and the daughter was age three.

I was in the briefing that evening when it was briefed to the general. And after the officer in charge briefed it to the general in a very calm manner, Colonel Rochelle of the 42nd Infantry Division, DISCOM Commander, turned in his chair to the entire division-level staff, and he said—and I quote—“If these [expletive] hajis learned to drive, this [expletive] wouldn’t happen.” I looked around the TOC at the other officers, at the other enlisted men, mostly higher enlisted. As a sergeant, I think I was the lowest-ranking person in that room. And I didn’t see one dissenting body language, one disagreeing head nod. Everyone was in agreeance that it’s true, if these F-ing hajis learned to drive, this S wouldn’t happen.

So?

JASON HURD: My name is Jason Hurd. I recently completed ten years of honorable service to my country in both the US Army and the Tennessee National Guard. I served in central Baghdad from November of ’04 to November of ’05.
…
Another personal story from my experience, the next mission that we got was to man the main checkpoint that entered into the Green Zone. We called this checkpoint Slaughterhouse 11, because the very first day we got into country, a car bomb went off in that checkpoint. We were a couple of blocks away at the time, and none of us knew what it was, so we were asking around, “What was that? What was that?” Oh, that’s the car bomb that goes off every single morning at checkpoint 11. And that’s where the name Slaughterhouse 11 comes from. You could literally set your watch by the time a car bomb would explode in that checkpoint every day.

Towards the end of my tour, we got the mission to take that checkpoint over. And my unit said, “What is the matter with you people? We’re getting ready to go home in just a couple of months. Why are you giving us Slaughterhouse 11? Are you wanting us to die?”

Day one that we took that checkpoint over and ran it ourselves, a car bomb drove into it and exploded. We found out that there was over a thousand pounds of explosives in that car afterwards. Luckily, it did not hurt any of my guys. My guys were able to find cover, and it didn’t hurt them. But it killed untold numbers of Iraqi civilians in queue to come into the checkpoint and injured so many more. I treated five people that day myself, and I would imagine twenty or thirty others got carted off into civilian ambulances before I could get to them.

But I have an image that is burned into my mind to this very day. And I remember a man running towards me at the front of the checkpoint, carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Iraqi guy, very thin, very sort of pale. He came running to me with this guy and laid him at my feet.

I looked down at him, and the guy was missing from here to here of his arm, and his forearm was only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding, and it was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso. And when I log-rolled him onto his side to check his rear for wounds, I noticed that his entire left butt cheek was missing, and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood.

And to this day, I have that image burned in my mind’s eye. Almost every couple of days, I will get a flash of red color in my mind’s eye, and it won’t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red. And every time, I associate it with that instance. So not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we’re disrupting the lives of our veterans with this occupation.

So?

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2008/ 3/ 17/ winter_

Busting Bush & Co in New England

Busting Bush & Co in New England

David Lindorff, Opednews.com

In Mansfield, CT, the town where I grew up, there were no police. Oh, there was a resident State Police officer with a big cruiser, but mainly, his job was patrolling the stretch of four-lane highway that ran north of us between Hartford and Boston. The University of Connecticut, a sprawling ag school at the time, had a few police, but their job was limited to patrolling the campus. If something happened, like a kid stealing candy from Phil’s, the local Five and Ten, or if there was some kind of domestic dispute, it fell to the local town constable—an elected position—to handle.

Up in the town of Marlboro, VT, population 1000, the town constable may have a new job. If President George W. Bush, or Vice President Dick Cheney should happen to stop by there, perhaps to pick up some freshly made maple syrup or maple sugar candy, he’d have to arrest them. Last night, the citizens of Marlboro voted in their annual town meeting to indict both men for war crimes, obstruction of justice and perjury. The vote was 43-25, with three abstentions.

Residents of nearby Brattleboro, population 12,000, did the same, voting 2012-1795.

It might be a challenge for the local constabulary, given the gaggle of stone-faced, ear-wired, Secret Service agents in their dark sunshades who encircle and protect the president and his regent whenever the two suspects travel out of the secure confines of the White House and Executive Office Building in Washington, but town constables are a dedicated lot, and I’m sure they’d do their best to get through and make the bust.

It’s a fair bet Bush and Cheney will keep Marlboro and Brattleboro off their travel itineraries, even after they’ve left office.

Harder, at least for the president, would be Kennebunkport, ME, where the Bush family summer compound is located. There, Laurie Dobson, Kennebunkport resident and an independent candidate for the Maine US Senate seat currently held by Republican Susan M. Collins, has filed a similar resolution, calling for Bush’s and Cheney’s arrests and extradition (or deportation) to a jurisdiction where they can be effectively prosecuted for war crimes and other criminal violations. If Dobson’s resolution were to pass, the president would be forced to fly to and from his compound by presidential helicopter, and would have to be afraid to open the front door, for fear it might be a Kennebunkport constable trying to do his duty.

Dobson last week presented her resolution to the town’s board of selectmen, who serve as a kind of executive for the day-to-day running of the affairs of the town under New England’s typical style of government. It reads: "Shall the Kennebunkport Board of Selectmen instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities, and shall it be the law of the Town of Kennebunkport that the Kennebunkport Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George W. Bush and Richard Cheney in Kennebunkport if they are not duly impeached, and prosecute or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

Dobson has also asked the board of selectmen to consider establishing a municipal war crimes tribunal to investigate the administration’s crimes under international law.

The resolutions passed by the residents of Brattleboro and Marlboro similarly call on the local constabulary to arrest the nation’s two top executives (yes, Cheney is in the Executive branch), and to "extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

David Swanson, of AfterDowningStreet.org, says the constables in Vermont may be quietly thrilled at the opportunity to make a presidential or vice presidential arrest.

As he puts it, “I know a lot of cops around the country who are going to be jealous of the Brattleboro police force. I'm thinking of all the police officers I've seen arrest activists in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, but accept impeachment T-shirts from them and hide them under their hats. Here is an opportunity for law-abiding and law-upholding working men and women to arrest the biggest criminals of our age, and the two men most responsible for the human and financial costs we and others have suffered these past seven years. Who wouldn't want to be in on this?”

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the “Live Free or Die” state sandwiched between Vermont and Maine, the state house or representatives is slated, later this week, to take up a resolution submitted by Rep. Betty Hall which, if passed, would call on the US House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president. A similar resolution was passed last year by the Vermont state senate. In hearings on her resolution earlier, a Republican member of that body gave what was the most passionate argument in support of the measure, suggesting that even Republicans of principle are recognizing a need to take a stand in defense of Constitution and the rule of law.

It may be that Bush and Cheney, the most impeachable duo to inhabit the White House in the nation’s history, may manage to slither through the remaining 10 months of their second term of office unimpeached and unprosecuted, thanks to the heroic efforts at delay and obstruction by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party congressional leadership. But clearly, they will be needing to steer clear of the northern tier of New England, which is ready to try and take them down.

Other communities that would like to make themselves Bush/Cheney Free Zones can go to AfterDowningStreet.org for a model ordinance.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net