Record of Shame: The Guantanamo Detainees

From Reed Richter at the politics@aqute list. I happen to agree with just about everything he says.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Politics] Record of Shame: The
Guantanamo Detainees
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:20:58 -0400
From: Reed
Richter <rrichter@alumni.unc.edu>
To: Politics
<politics@aqute.biz>

Record of Shame: The Guantanamo Detainees

"These are people that got scooped off a battlefield, attempting to kill U.S. troops. And, uh, I want to make sure before they're released that they don't come back to kill again."
President George Bush

"The people that are there are people we picked up on a battlefield primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers, they're facilitators of terror, they're members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban."
Vice President Dick Cheney

After just hearing a rebroadcast of the NPR show below, I am at this moment feeling a great deal of shame and anger for my country:

Habeas Schmabeas
<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=310>
Winner of a 2006 Peabody Award (hear the original broadcast)

http://transnationallawblog.typepad.com/americanlife.pdf

(the written transcript)

Excerpts (there is solid evidence for all of the claims below):

HITT [narator journalist Jack Hitt]: "Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics." [They were picked up in their apartment by the Pakistani army.]

... We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible, that we need
an offshore facility, away from U.S. laws, to hold them. But then there's Badr,
and every day more stories like his are coming out. And they raised the question: Is Guantanamo a campful of terrorists, or a campful of mistakes? In a new study by Seton Hall's law school, researchers simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here's what they found:

Only 5% of our detainees at Guantanamo were "scooped up" by American troops, on the battlefield or anywhere else. Five percent. The rest? We never saw them fighting.

And here's something else: Only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as Al Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Donleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners.

In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation, interviewing dozens of high level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus: that out of nearly 600
men at Guantanamo, the number who could give ususeful information about Al Qaeda was "only a relative handful." Some put the number at about a dozen. Others more than two dozen.

The Seton Hall study might help explain that; it revealed that 86% of the detainees were handed over to us by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance. And some
were handed over to us by a new method – here's Badr.

BADR: Actually, in our interrogation, the American interrogators have been telling us they have paid a lot of money to those who handed over us to Americans.

HUTSON: The problem was, we were offering bounties, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 (Al Qaeda brought more than Taliban did) and so "ok, fine, here's your money" and they take them to Gitmo.

HITT: That's Rear Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyer. He was judge advocate general until 2000. He says, essentially we bought Badr, and a whole lot of other prisoners.

Here's another detainee story backed by evidence:

Baher Azmy is a lawyer who represents one of the detainees, but he couldn't attend his client's CSRT [Combatant Status Review Tribunal] because actual lawyers aren't allowed.

AZMY: They were each appointed a personal representative who's a military officer, um, who in my case met with my client the day before for 15 minutes, sat silent and failed to present all of the exculpatory evidence in his file, which, of course, any lawyer would have done. Not the personal representative.

HITT: And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing.

AZMY: The classified file contains – the Washington Post wrote about it – six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is. Memos saying "this person was here" or "so-and-so witnessed him…" In Kurnaz's case, there are five or six statements saying, "There's no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he has got no connection to Al Qaeda. There's no evidence linking him to the Taliban." Over and over and over again.

HITT: But here's the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider
it. And Kurnaz himself doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant; he's still at Guantanamo today.

But wait. There's more. The reason they give for holding him? A friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's 2 years after Kurnaz got picked up.

AZMY: So, setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one's friend does, it's actually preposterous in that a simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well, and under no suspicion of any such thing.

HITT: You heard that right. Kurnaz is in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn't become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.

AZMY: Yeah, he's walking around in Germany; I've met him.

And there are many more such stories. Of course, such mistakes wouldn't be so disastrous if there wasn't also a load of evidence (also presented in the broadcast) that many of these innocents weren't also humiliated, tortured, and had their lives and the lives of their loved ones ruined.

Now, dear reader, you can doubt the accuracy of such accounts - after all, it's a free country. But given what we now know about the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration and the outright lies and intentional distortions, I ask you: Is there a 25% chance that the details of this broadcast are accurate? (Listen to these interviews and decide for yourself, the actual tone of voice and poise do make an evidential difference (versus merely reading the transcript).) And if so, what are the implications if the details are accurate?

There is a significant chance that we are now living a moment of national shame that will eclipse the Mai Lai Massacre, the McCarthy era and the WWII Japanese detentions - that our grandchildren will wonder what we knew, and why these abuses were tolerated for so long.

Reed Richter