We can't have acquitals! We've gotta have convictions!

Politics International Politics
1

Head of Guantanamo trials resigns

[quote]The Pentagon official overseeing the planned military trials of Canadian Omar Khadr and other terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba resigned Monday - just days after a published report alleged he’d insisted there be no acquittals.

As General Counsel at the U.S. defence department, William J. Haynes was a leading architect of the military commission system U.S. President George. W. Bush ordered established in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

But his alleged backroom insistence the commission produce only convictions provoked a rush of commentary - much of charging it proved the trials will be a sham.

…

Haynes’ alleged comments appeared in an interview Nation magazine conducted with Col. Morris Davis, who resigned last October as the commission’s chief prosecutor, citing political interference.

[b]“I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis was quoted as saying about an August 2005 meeting the two men had.

“At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We’ve got to have convictions.’[/b]”[/quote]

Hehe. That’s brilliant. The taxi to the dark side has long ago reached its destination!

2

And people wonder why US influence is diminishing on the world stage?

3

It looks like rumor is sufficient to condemn in some corners.

Some background:
[i]"Separately, the Defense Department said yesterday that its controversial general counsel, William J. Haynes II, is stepping down. “I have valued his legal advice and enjoyed working with him,” Gates said in a statement. Haynes had been in the job since May 2001.

Senior military lawyers have clashed with Haynes frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, especially regarding the handling of terrorism suspects at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most recently, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, said that he would testify as a defense witness in the trial of the former driver for Osama bin Laden and that Haynes had stated that acquittals of suspects held at Guantanamo would make the United States look bad. Through a spokesman, Haynes denied making such a comment.

Haynes had been nominated twice by President Bush for a federal judgeship, but the White House withdrew his name in January 2007 in the face of Senate opposition. Haynes was seen as an ally of Vice President Cheney, having worked as the Army’s top lawyer when Cheney was defense secretary during the George H.W. Bush administration."[/i]
Wash Post - 26 Feb

[i]"Davis alleges, among other things, that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II said in August 2005 that any acquittals of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo would make the United States look bad, calling into question the fairness of the proceedings.

"He said, ‘We can’t have acquittals; we’ve got to have convictions,’ " Davis recalled.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, denied that Haynes made such a comment. Gordon also denied the former prosecutor’s allegations of political interference, which he has repeated in newspaper opinion columns and in interviews in recent months."[/i]
LA Times - Guantanamo prosecutor turns defense witness - 22 Feb '08

[i]"Former Gitmo Prosecutor to Testify for Bin Laden’s Driver
Posted by Dan Slater

CampJustice Salim Hamdan — Osama bin Laden’s former driver got some pretty good news yesterday regarding his upcoming case. Gitmo’s former chief prosecutor will testify on Hamdan’s behalf. Here’s the story from LB colleague Jess Bravin.

In what Bravin describes as “another blow to the Bush administration,” Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October in a dispute with Defense Department superiors, agreed to testify at an April 28 hearing at the request of Hamdan’s attorneys.

According to the report, Davis, although he criticizes the Pentagon’s refusal to rule out the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding, says his decision to testify doesn’t mean he plans to suggest that Hamdan is innocent. At a recent meeting with defense lawyers Davis said, “I’m more than happy to describe my observations of the process, but you probably don’t want me to testify on the guilt or innocence of your clients.”

In December, Davis was blocked from testifying that policy changes had left the military-commission system — which was set up to prosecute Gitmo prisoners for war crimes — open to improper political influence, including possible pressure to use information obtained through waterboarding.

One of Hamdan’s lawyers, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer, said that at Guantanamo, he expected Davis to testify about his discussions with Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) during the drafting of the Military Commissions Act, and about the role played by William J. Haynes II, the Bush-appointed Pentagon general counsel. Cmdr. Mizer said he sought out Col. Davis after reading press accounts of his complaints. “It certainly was awkward,” he said. “This is our former foe in the courtroom.”[/i]
WSJ Law Blog

Architect of Bush’s Detainee Policies to Step Down

DOD general counsel Haynes announces resignation

Mr. Hayes has had considerable criticism from certain corners regarding his role in helping to draft the Defense Department’s detention and interrogation policies after Sept. 11.
I would guess that the unsubstantiated allegations regarding his statements has made him a person of interest in the mentioned hearings about Osamas driver.

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You make me laugh TC.

I thought it was universally known that besides everything else that is wrong with the detentions in Guantanamo it is the allowing of “hear say evidence” into the trials that is most egregious.

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[quote=“Fox”][quote]It looks like rumor is sufficient to condemn in some corners[/quote]You make me laugh TC.
I thought it was universally known that besides everything else that is wrong with the detentions in Guantanamo it is the allowing of “hear say evidence” into the trials that is most egregious.[/quote]Fox -
Thanks…I try…:smiley:

Regarding your “thoughts”:
Are you commenting about your assumptions - not a universally held position although maybe a popular one in your group of associates - that the detentions in Gitmo are wrong by your standards? This is a separate topic than the OT here.
The background to the situation I posted shows that the resignation of Mr. Hayes may well not be connected to the allegations, un-substantiated or corroborated as yet, put forth by the OP. It also appears that he may be called into a very related case regarding the ‘Osama driver’ situation. This may figure into his removing himself from his position.

Am I to understand by your rather convoluted post that you also see this melodramatic hype as the travesty it obviously is?

Good for You!

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May God – and the Constitution – preserve us from a mentality which is willing to imprison people for life on the basis of secret hearsay evidence but not willing to be held accountable itself on the basis of eyewitness testimony by credible witnesses.

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Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him

They are matter-of-factly talking about my country the way people in my country used to talk about the Soviet Union. Secret police, secret prisons, ‘clandestine system of justice’, ‘government’s own secret files’…

Held for five years. At least he’s out.

8

probably more humane to have executed them on the battlefield than to have captured them, interrogated and tortured them, transported them across the world to a max security, essentially solitary confinement, prison and locked them up for ten years, with no trial, no useful access to lawyers, no charges brought, no legal redress or appeal system, no legal rights, and no prospect of a fair trial for the fear of the captors at being proved wrong.

all this, and they get made out to be martyrs and heroes when they finally are killed, or become heroes and darlings of the continued ideology war when they finally get released. no benefit there to the US position at all from their actions in the creation and maintenance of Gitmo. “taking no prisoners” was a far cleaner system, all things considered.

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[quote=“urodacus”]probably more humane to have executed them on the battlefield than to have captured them, interrogated and tortured them, transported them across the world to a max security, essentially solitary confinement, prison and locked them up for ten years, with no trial, no useful access to lawyers, no charges brought, no legal redress or appeal system, no legal rights, and no prospect of a fair trial for the fear of the captors at being proved wrong.

all this, and they get made out to be martyrs and heroes when they finally are killed, or become heroes and darlings of the continued ideology war when they finally get released. no benefit there to the US position at all from their actions in the creation and maintenance of Gitmo. “taking no prisoners” was a far cleaner system, all things considered.[/quote]
But the people like the one I posted about didn’t get picked up on the battlefield. He got pulled off a bus in Pakistan because the US was paying $3,000 for ‘suspicious’ foreigners.

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well, that’s a battlefield too, for a predator drone. I note that simply being a ‘civilian’ at a wedding party or in a bus hasn’t stopped the US in other jurisdictions they aren’t privy to, either.

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Why did they arrest him if he wasn’t guilty? And he was hardly tortured because he’s still got all his body parts. All you really need to know is John McCain is going to protect you from the bogeyman and Barry Hussein Obama is the illegitimate son of Osama bin Laden and Jane Fonda. Denying these facts is offering aid and comfort to terrorists.

Now shut up.

12

Good article on how the military legal system is rebelling against Bush’s kangaroo courts.

[quote]The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they’d been out on the battlefield, they’d have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they’re not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That’s not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It’s because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence. And much as it must pain them, this precludes them from being yes men for the Bush administration at the expense of the rule of law.
[/quote]

slate.com/id/2191301/pagenum/all/
More members of the military turn against the terror trials. - By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

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[quote=“Dr. McCoy”]Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him

They are matter-of-factly talking about my country the way people in my country used to talk about the Soviet Union. Secret police, secret prisons, ‘clandestine system of justice’, ‘government’s own secret files’…

Held for five years. At least he’s out.[/quote]

A site called World Politics Review has a different view of Murat Kurnaz’s case from that of 60 Minutes. The blog article is here.

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[quote=“Charlie Jack”][quote=“Dr. McCoy”]Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him

They are matter-of-factly talking about my country the way people in my country used to talk about the Soviet Union. Secret police, secret prisons, ‘clandestine system of justice’, ‘government’s own secret files’…

Held for five years. At least he’s out.[/quote]

A site called World Politics Review has a different view of Murat Kurnaz’s case from that of 60 Minutes. The blog article is here.[/quote]

The article in your link read like a Stasi dossier from the 1950’s and 60’s, replete with hearsay denunciations, guilt by association, “suspicious” activities such as buying boots, owning binoculars and suspicious travel itineraries.

No wonder the German public wanted nothing to do with it, having only recently emerged from the oppressive shadows of seventy years of successive police states and probably not wanting anything more to do with them and their tactics.

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[quote=“Quoted in Der Spiegel in January of last year, Die Welt”]In 2001, just a few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, Murat Kurnaz was on the road with his friend Selcuk Bilgin, whose parents say he wanted to become a militant jihadist in Afghanistan. It may well be true that Kurnaz was just a fool looking for God, a red-haired Turk who wasn’t even accepted as a true Muslim in Pakistan … If Kurnaz had just wanted to pray, he could have done it here in Germany. He obviously wanted a little action too.[/quote] The article is here.

[quote=“In March of this year, Der Spiegel”]Cüneyt Ciftci, a young man from Bavaria, blew himself up outside a government building in Afghanistan, killing two US soldiers and two Afghanis.

Although a number of Islamist terror plots have been hatched in Germany – the most famous of which being the 9/11 attacks, which were partly planned by a terror cell led by Mohamed Atta in Hamburg – Ciftci is the first suicide bomber to have been born and raised in Germany. That fact is making German security and intelligence authorities very worried. The DVD shows exactly what young radical Islamists, of which hundreds are known in Germany, can become within a short period of time.[/quote] The article is here.

I, too, disagree with the way Murat Kurnaz was treated. But spook, you don’t seem to have addressed the issue of whether he ought to have been stopped. Indeed, your post seems to imply that it was wrong to stop him, that he should have been left alone to proceed with his travels. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you?

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Isn’t this nice? Friends helping friends around the world.

[quote]U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men – or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel “are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese,”

she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said. [/quote]

abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4894921&page=1

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"Real change in Cuba also requires political freedom. In this area too, the regime has made grand commitments. One of Raul’s first acts after receiving his new titles was to sign a major United Nations treaty on human rights. Yet when it comes to respecting human rights on the island, the regime has not attempted even cosmetic changes. For example, political dissidents continue to be harassed, detained, and beaten, and more than 200 prisoners of conscience still languish in Castro’s tropical gulag.

Recently, I received a letter from a man who spent 17 years in these dungeons. He described them as “dens of torture and pain and death.” This is an undeniable violation of the U.N. treaty that Cuba just signed. If the regime views this document as anything more than a worthless piece of paper, it must immediately stop its abuse of political dissidents and release all political prisoners."
President Bush yesterday admonishing Cuba to end its hypocrisy and begin respecting human rights on the island nation

What’s wrong with this picture?

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[quote=“spook”]

What’s wrong with this picture?[/quote]
It’s not like anyone takes him seriously anymore.