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US Courts Convict 91 pct in Terrorism Trials: Study
MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo prisoners could be successfully tried in the United States because an overwhelming number of terrorism cases in U.S. courts since the September 11 attacks have led to convictions, a study released Thursday said.
Moreover, the trials did not leak national secrets or endanger surrounding communities, Human Rights First said in report issued amid a national debate over how to prosecute foreign terrorism suspects held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
President Barack Obama, who ordered the Guantanamo prison shut down by January, has said he prefers trying cases in the U.S. district courts but that some might have to be tried in a revamped version of the Guantanamo military tribunals that have completed only three cases in more than seven years.
Critics argue that trying Guantanamo prisoners in the U.S. courts would expose classified information, hamstring prosecutors, endanger neighboring communities and coddle the suspects by granting them additional rights.
The study, conducted by former federal prosecutors for the rights group, analyzed 119 U.S. court cases filed since September 2001 against 289 people accused of terrorism-related crimes and associated with al Qaeda or other Islamist extremist groups.
Of the 214 defendants whose cases were resolved, 195 -- 91 percent -- were convicted. Many of the acquitted still did not walk free because the government subsequently brought new charges against them or detained them for immigration violations, said the study titled "In Pursuit of Justice."
'EFFECTIVE AND FAIR'
Among the 171 who had been sentenced, 151 got prison terms and 20 were put on probation or sentenced to time already served. The average sentence was 8.4 years, and 11 got life terms, said the study by Human Rights First, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that promotes international freedoms.
It concluded that the existing court system is up to the task of trying terrorism cases and there is no need to create new Guantanamo tribunals or a new national security court, as some have proposed.
"While new systems have failed and new 'fixes' have been floated, the criminal justice system has continued to build on its long record of being an effective and fair tool for incapacitating terrorists," it said.
The authors said the Classified Information Procedures Act, which protects secret information used as evidence, appears to be working because they could find no instance where there was a substantial leak of sensitive information as a result of terrorism prosecutions.
Nor had interrogation or criminal prosecution in the studied cases been hampered by the Miranda rule, which requires that suspects be told their words could be use as evidence against them and that they are entitled to lawyers before questioning.
The courts have ruled that the warning is not required in certain circumstances involving interrogation by foreign officials, and can be applied flexibly "to accommodate the exigencies of local conditions," the study noted in an apparent reference to battlefield captures.
The study said a rash of recent proposals by U.S. elected officials trying to keep Guantanamo prisoners from being incarcerated in their communities seemed to be based more on fear than fact.
"The United States justice system has a long and successful history of prosecuting suspected terrorists by generally achieving just results without causing danger to the nation's or local communities' safety and security," it said.
(Editing by Jim Loney and Xavier Briand)
14 Comments so far
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I highly recommend that people read Satanic Purses by R.T. Naylor to shed a bit of light on these sham trials. Looks like the red scare all overagain this time it's green.
Wondering what Satanic Purses is about I did a Web search and believe the following links are fine starters, and the McGill one is likely a page through which the book can be ordered, given the book's published by McGill-Queen's University Press, which is a "joint venture of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario". That page for the book provides a good description and perhaps more on the author's, R.T. Naylor's, views and biography. The other two links, below, are brief but apparently good enough reviews.
The book's full title is, "Satanic Purses: Money, Myth, and Misinformation in the War on Terror", and it was released in 2006.
http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/39/01/naylor
http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=5147
http://www.hour.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=10368
I hadn't heard or read anything about the book, before, but based on what I've read about it now it certainly seems like it should be good, or very good; as well, I think, as a fitting recommendation by Mc Me.
What's this? 9 percent are not found guilty, or is that just 9 percent of the trials are in process of getting re-tried???
The 9%? Hmmm. I should have included that in my fully separate post, for this, what I'll say, completes what's said in my separate post.
Perhaps what's happened is that they got their database report screwed up, the numbers swapped incorrectly around. That is, maybe it's 9% were found guilty and the 91% would have been found innocent, with a few mysteriously found to be detainable because of some odd immigration violations. If this is what's happened, then it's likely that the computer database programmer screwed up his or her code logic; causing the numbers or figures to be incorrectly read and/or swapped for the printed database report. Or maybe this is what's happened, with a slight variation; intentional, instead of unintentional, misrepresentation of the data.
In any case, I won't believe that 91% of 214 detainees were truly found guilty of acts related to terrorism; not until learning otherwise from known reliable, truthful people. I see none that I'm aware of named in the Reuters article, so I won't count on it being accurate in terms of telling us the real truth.
In terms of the governments of the USA, UK, Canada, and other NATO countries participating in the GWoT, the part in Afghanistan anyway, since most of NATO is (I believe) not in Iraq, we have what? A hell of a LOT of LIES, gross distortions, hypocrisy, hegemony, cover-up, imperialism, ....
I doubt that 91% of the number the article says were tried were actually found guilty of terrorism in truthful terms. There have been many reports over the past several years about how the so-called military trials were bogus, corrupt, .... We've had many reports also saying that most of the people detained at Guantanamo Bay prison were not guilty.
QUOTE:
The study, conducted by former federal prosecutors for the rights group, analyzed 119 U.S. court cases filed since September 2001 against 289 people accused of terrorism-related crimes and associated with al Qaeda or other Islamist extremist groups.
Of the 214 defendants whose cases were resolved, 195 -- 91 percent -- were convicted. Many of the acquitted still did not walk free because the government subsequently brought new charges against them or detained them for immigration violations, said the study titled "In Pursuit of Justice."
END QUOTE
196 of 214 surely were not truthfully, honestly, legitimately, legally found guilty of terrorism ... anything. I won't believe otherwise until learning from reliable people that I'm mistaken about this.
And what "immigration violations"? Few people detained at Guantamamo Bay prison were picked up in the U.S. or in what the U.S. government claims are its territories, and if any were, then they probably had legal, bogus-ified by the CIA, but nevertheless officially legal papers to be in the U.S. to begin with.
I believe it's a U.S. consulate official in ... perhaps Saudi Arabia and whose name I forget, but who has exposed what the CIA did there to roguely get certain individuals into the U.S. and fast, providing the legal paperwork, but having filled it in in very bogus, corrupt ways. I just viewed a video over the past couple of weeks describing this, the consulate official I'm referring to being the person describing what the CIA did and showing how badly they filled out the papers.
Those people were relatively few and it's the CIA that's guilty for getting those apparently undesirable foreigners, Saudis and maybe some other people, into the U.S. If recalling what the U.S. consulate official says in the video, which I wish I remembered the title of it so that I could find the link and include it in this post; well, then these foreigners were undesirable or suspect, but they nevertheless did not go to the U.S. all of their own doing. The CIA made sure they got to the U.S.
Anyway, if it's true that some of the people the U.S. found to be innocent of terrorism related acts, but detained them for immigration violations because some actually occurred, then the U.S. still has no legitimate grounds for detaining these people for this reason, immigration violations. They'd have violated no immigration policies of the US.
And if I'm not mistaken about this, then the only legal bodies that could have legal grounds for charging and punishing these detainees for immigration violations are the international court and/or the courts of the countries where these detainees had violated immigration policies.
What? They were violating immigration policies by being in Guantanamo Bay prison, where the U.S. had renditioned these persons to after arresting them on no just grounds? Is this the "joke"?
The article, if it was competently done, would tell readers which countries' immigration policies were violated, and why the U.S. doesn't hand these persons over to these countries, or to the international court, if the countries are known to practice torture, etc.
It's not legitimate, it's not legal, for the U.S. to act as if it's policeman and court or judge for the whole world. And it has no legitimate right to maintain Guantanamo Bay prison, either. Cuba's been demanding for decades that the U.S. leave. Cuba's not receptive to the lease the U.S. imposes! The U.S. is guilty of violating "immigration" policies there! Actually worse. The U.S. is guilty of imposing colonialist imperialism and act of war; just that there's no way that Cuba can risk causing the U.S. to react by bombing the country or its capital.
Anyway, I doubt the U.S. has legitimately, legally found 91% of 214 detainees guilty of ... anything, much less terrorism-related acts.
It's tragic that our government is continuing on the path to a post-Constitutional, authoritarian nation controlled by a Unitary Executive and a court of oligarchs and plutocrats disguised as legislators and the judiciary.
The judiciary is becoming an extension of the state security services. The Executive Branch and DOJ are working hard to develop "new process" to replace "due process" in an effort to meet the judiciary halfway.
Everything has become so ratcheted rightwards that civil libertarians opposing indefinite detention and related segregation of terrorism cases into an extra-judicial venue resort to "selling" the effectiveness of the existing court system to convict terrorists.
That is, in order to push back against the current extreme status quo, the civil libertarians who otherwise would be CRITICIZING regular courts for their travesties and show trials instead praise the courts as effective adjudicators of alleged terror-related crimes. They're in a nasty bind.
It's exactly like the FISA situation: when the Obama-supported draconian new FISA legislation was enacted in 2008, civil libertarians complained that the new rules were unnecessary and unwise, since the existing FISA court was doing a wonderful job granting warrants on demand!
They weren't REALLY saying "just restore FISA Court Classic, and all will be well!" But they were accentuating the positive and ignoring the negative.
There's overwhelming evidence that at every level, the policy of the US government is to deal as harshly as possible with any person accused of terrorism-related crimes, and to obtain convictions by any means necessary.
I believe that Amerika's political and legal system is so inherently rigged to punish alleged terrorism that it is impossible to give an accused terrorist a fair trial in a US venue.
· Yr Obd't Servant
for a very long time, many , many years - i have always thought and told friends that the
"USA is TOO CONSERVATIVE and RIGHTWING---it will one day be its OWN undoing that will rend apart what americans THINK *holds them together*..CONSERVATISM..because what it IS is a ZOMBIE philosophy and mindset that keeps walking far beyond its natural life...if ever it was even proper to have existed as a mentality...it is like a DEAD man walking that will poison everything it touches in the end".
economics, authoritarianism, love of warfare as a way to "preserve" conservative "values"....etc....it's exactly as I always thought...it's a philosophy that never wants to GROW UP!
Yes, Human Rights First may be trying to get to a resolution, but, as you've suggested, it compromises Constitutional principles to even suggest that trials take place.
Habeas corpus legal precedent is long established. Guantanamo prisoners must be released immediately since they were never charged before a U.S. court. That's the law, and the Obama administration isn't following the law.
The idea of Obama as a "Constitutional lawyer" was mentioned during the Presidential campaign. What a joke!
-TIA
When will US COURTS convict US WAR CRIMINALS -- 100 percent?
oh wait -- the USA doesn't DO war crimes -- it just LIBERATES........
The only 'classified' information there is, is that which is useable in coercive, dominating ways by the rich to maintain their control and power over the world's poor.
There really are not nations anymore. So, to think in terms of the United States and a pre-eminent 'national security' that protects the citizens of the U.S. for example, is a farcical lie.
The world needs one thing and one thing alone: The openness of heart and mind that realizes ALL people have a right. An equal right to be...
I am so sick of this planet and the technocracy that stokes paranoia and greed and, so-called 'security'. What SHIT. What an evil load of selfish, money-grubbing, hate-inducing SHIT.
Plus, the bastards that need to go jail over all this, don't want to go. They don't want to face up to their crimes. It's their security, they think. So they let the original life-giving planet burn, for this false security, this avoidance of their culpability and guilt. They have a debt to us, and it is a debt we cannot forgive if we are to have any hope for life at all...
To all the present day 'leadership': GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200. GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.
Lockstep # 33
Is it un-American and un-PATRIOTIC to acquit?