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Today's Top News
Remember 9/11, Remember Guantánamo
Eight years on, justice is still denied to 225 men who remain imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay
Today, as we pause to remember those who died in the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, we should also remember that much work still needs to be done to address the fallout from the Bush administration's extraordinary response to the attacks.
In Guantánamo, 225 men remain imprisoned, ostensibly in connection with these attacks, or with the "war on terror" that followed, even though, in all but a few dozen cases, they have never been charged with any crime, and only one man (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul) has been tried and convicted.
Two outstanding problems remain with Guantánamo. The first concerns the few dozen prisoners accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks or other acts of international terrorism. As a result of the Bush administration's cavalier approach to the law, and its senseless and illegal approach to the use of torture, these men are still held without a trial date in sight.
If the Bush administration had treated 9/11 as a criminal act, and had built a criminal case against these men rather than torturing them in a network of secret prisons, they would probably have been tried and sentenced by now. As it is, however, only Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani has been put forward for a trial in a federal court, and the government plans to pursue other cases using a revamped version of the military commissions introduced by President Bush, which are damaged beyond repair.
To bring justice to these men - and for justice to be seen to be done - President Obama needs to pursue these cases in federal courts, knowing that no jury will fail to convict them if the government can produce any genuine evidence. The relatives of those who lost their lives on 9/11 deserve nothing less.
For the other prisoners at Guantánamo, the situation is more complicated. In June 2008, the US supreme court ruled that they had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights. Since then, the district courts have granted 29 out of 36 habeas appeals, deriding the government for relying on dubious informers within Guantánamo, multiple levels of hearsay and weak "mosaics" of evidence, and dealing a mortal blow to the Bush administration's allegations that Guantánamo held "the worst of the worst".
These are unsurprising results, given that prisoners were never adequately screened (either on capture, or in the years since), and that many were sold to US forces for bounty payments averaging $5,000 a head.
The prisoners' situation is further complicated by the fact that an interagency Guantánamo Task Force, established to review their cases and decide on their future, is effectively competing with the courts, even though it operates in secret and has only led, so far, to the release of a handful of prisoners.
However, even in the courts, problems remain with the government's definition of the prisoners. The courts are obliged only to consider whether the government has demonstrated, "by a preponderance of the evidence", that the men were connected to al-Qaida and/or the Taliban. As a result, judges have ruled, in other cases, that marginal characters in the inter-Muslim civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance (which morphed into a war against the US after 9/11) can continue to be held.
I believe that, after eight years, it is time to examine whether it is plausible to continue holding men in connection with a "war on terror" that - despite being renamed by Obama - still seems to be regarded as a conflict that may go on forever, even though the specific conflict in which these men were captured - the overthrow of the Taliban - ended in November 2004, when Hamid Karzai was elected as the Afghan president.
Beyond Guantánamo, other problems remain. Obama is clinging to claims that foreign prisoners rendered to the US prison at Bagram - seized in similar circumstances to those at Guantánamo who were subjected to "extraordinary rendition" - can continue to be held without access to lawyers. In addition, Afghan prisoners in Bagram, who should be held as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, still seem to be regarded as assets for whom rights are secondary to their perceived intelligence value.
Hovering over all these problems are even darker issues - the fate of the hundreds of men held in secret CIA prisons or rendered to other countries, and the long road to accountability for those who implemented these policies - but as the most bleakly iconic symbol of the Bush administration's response to 9/11, Guantánamo remains the most obvious challenge to Obama's stated ambition to "regain America's moral stature in the world".
On the eighth anniversary of 9/11, however, justice is being delivered neither to those regarded as genuinely dangerous, nor to those whose significance has been exaggerated.
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10 Comments so far
Show Allfrom the Guardian:
-Al-Bahlul ...was found guilty by a jury of nine military officers who deliberated for just under an hour.
-Al-Bahlul had previously called the military tribunal a "legal farce" and refused to mount a defence by boycotting the trial silently at the defence table. At al-Bahlul's request, his military lawyer did not speak either, declining even to answer questions from the judge.
This is the one "trial" and "conviction" Americans can point to? Ha!
our situation is even worse. the tribunal's lead counsel has admitted there are no cases to bring forward - no evidence
don't matter - the "defendants" have no right to hear the charges made against them, have no right to see the evidence against them and if found inncent they will not be set free anyway
It is about time the "spam filters" were removed...
I wonder what that was about...?
GoldenMean: perhaps Common Dream will favor us with a response to your question placed on their website or as a reply to your comment.
From the title of his article, I thought perhaps Mr. Worthington was going to write of an equivalence between the "remembering" actions against those whom we believed had committed 9/11 and the "remembering" of Quantanamo and many other human rights violations by the U.S. and its various "allies" in acts of judicial terrorism. That turned out not to be the case, as Worthington focussed (appopriately) on the issue of justice as a denied human right rather than as the source of international resentment against the U.S. But I think it's well to reflect on an anniversary of 9/11 that every act of over-reaction and state terrorism that we have committed in the aftermath of 9/11 will be "remembered" and eventually appropriately (even inappropriately) acted upon by those who have been its victims. Every death toll of a drone attack that kills civilians as Taliban insurgents are being "targeted"---every rescue of a NY Times reporter at the expense of the life of his Afghan interpreter---we may think of these as the "banality of evil" or the "collateral damage of war" but the victims of these "daily 9/11s" carried on throughout the world will "remember" these acts of "self defense" in ways that we are not going to like. From this point forward, "remembering 9/11" should include remembering (or discovering for the first time) what it was that led up to 9/11/01 and what has been the consequence of the "remembering" reaction.
There are so many serious issues here, Worthington has barely touched on them. There is the right to a fair and speedy trial, there are huge jurisdictional problems, a lack of (in most cases) any believable witnesses, and so on.
I shall focus one one statement: 'The courts are obliged only to consider whether the government has demonstrated, "by a preponderance of the evidence", that the men were connected to al-Qaida and/or the Taliban.' The problem with this, is that the US goverment, both overtly and covertly, has been connected to both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This makes that court decision totally absurd.
"The problem with this, is that the US goverment, both overtly and covertly, has been connected to both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This makes that court decision totally absurd."
Yes well when Obama said "we look forward not backward" he meant this as more of a loose rule of thumb than as an unbreakable principle
You see, in the post rule of law era, the government cannot be held accountable for what it has already done, that would be "looking back"...
while at the same time, people kidnapped, transported to third countries and held indefinitely, can be tried and convicted because we are still "looking forward" to seeing what court and what charge Obama is going to invent for them.
good stuff
let us consider how we came to be "in posession" of guantanamo bay
"On June 10, 1898, U.S. Marines landed at Guantánamo Bay. For the next month, American troops fought a land war in Cuba that resulted in the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. Cuban rebels had gained the sympathy of the American public while the explosion and sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, widely blamed on the Spanish despite the absence of conclusive evidence, further boosted American nationalistic fervor.
Popular demand for intervention in the Cuban-Spanish conflict led Congress to pass resolutions demanding the withdrawal of Spanish armed forces from Cuba, authorizing U.S. aid to effect this, and promising American support for Cuban self-rule. Spain declared war against the United States on April 24, 1898, and the United States promptly replied with a counter-declaration."
first off: we now have the us navy admitting the attack on the maine was a false flag event, after all these years. the navy now says it may have been a spontaneous explosion within the ship in the weapons hold
cuba rejected american offer of aid as they feared they would be swallowed up by imperial america - the congress passed a resolution that they would leave cuba after the hostilities ended
when the war was over the congress rescinded the resolution
110 years later we are still there under the pretense of having a legal "lease"
its insanely laughable...
In a criminal case, if I was on a jury, and the defendant was a suspected murderer, but I discovered the the defendant had been tortured and falsely imprisoned for 8 years before being brought to trial - sorry, but I'd want the case thrown out. I'd want charges instead brought against the government. In spite of the author's assertion that:
"To bring justice to these men - and for justice to be seen to be done - President Obama needs to pursue these cases in federal courts, knowing that no jury will fail to convict them if the government can produce any genuine evidence. "
Especially, considering that, with regard to 911, the truth about those events was clearly hidden from the public.