Anyway we again are presented with evidence that US trials of Guantanamo " Detainees" will be all for show . Justice will have little to do with these trials. But how could we have expected otherwise from the Bush/Cheney Regime since they claim these detainees were denied their basic rights as captured " Enemy Combatants " or as POWs because they are all guilty of being terrorists. If there a lot of acquittals then the truth would be that innocent individuals had been held in an illegal and unethical manner and had been tortured and abused against the rules of the Geneva Conventions & common decency. But if Bush, Cheney & Condoleeza Rice & Rumsfeld & Gonzales thinks these people are guilty , then , it follows that they must be.But we tend to forget Bush and Cheney are " Infallible " as we have been told by the Media . For Example Bush and Cheney & Co. may have been mistaken about whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMDs or was connected to Al Qaeda or 9/11 but after all they were right we are told to have invaded Iraq to oust Saddam .Never mind that Saddam was in great part an American fiend & ally and in part America's creation like Pres. Musharraf of Pakistan or General Pinochet of Chile . Americans are fond of their dictators who can carry out America's policies and agenda by proxy.
The Media also contrary to the " Facts on the Ground " these days tells us things are going well in Iraq . Yet there are still three million refugees living in Syria and other countries whom the American's refuse to acknowledge or help in any real substantive manner. American's so loved the Iraqi people that they wanted to free the Iraqis from Saddam's brutal regime. But the compassion of Americans does not extend to helping out refugees or taking a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis into America country as refugees . This is especially true as America builds walls around its borders to keep all those evil refugees out of America.
In an article from The Nation posted at CommonDreams.org we get some details about the Show Trials to come:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 by The Nation
Rigged Trials at Gitmo,by Ross Tuttle
Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them.
Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”
When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.
“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] 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 can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”
Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”
Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.”
“That he [Haynes] said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process,” says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes’s conflicts with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration’s views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration’s advocacy of “extreme interrogation techniques.”
“The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job,” says Horton. “His clashes have always had the same subtext–they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work.”
Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes’s role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.
also check out article from Truthout Feb. 19,2008:
Marjorie Cohn | Tortured Evidence: Injustice at Guantanamo.
Marjorie Cohn, writing for The Jurist, says: "The Bush administration has announced its intention to try six alleged al Qaeda members at Guantanamo under the Military Commissions Act. That Act forbids the admission of evidence extracted by torture, although it permits evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if it was secured before December 30, 2005. Thus, the administration would be forbidden from relying on evidence obtained by waterboarding, if waterboarding constitutes torture."
Big Brother is working diligently we are told to uncover what journalists and academics are saying on the phone to friends outside the United States . The US Supreme Court says it is vital that Bush keep spying on US citizens without worrying about those pesky legal nice-ities such a warrant from a court.This important work will continue but give me a break they would probably continue anyway. It is just that Bush and Cheney think if they can badger legislators or the courts into giving them some form of legal sanction then no matter what they do is therefore acceptable.
And there are some 20,000 detainees being held in Iraq and the number is growing as reported in this next article : US Detention of Iraqis Grows Without End,By Christopher Kuttruff t r u t h o u t,Wednesday 20 February 2008
The United States is, once again, expanding the size of its largest detention center in Iraq. According to an October 31 report by the military paper Stars and Stripes, US forces will be increasing the capacity of detainees at Camp Bucca from 20,000 to 30,000.
An ever-increasing prison population has put extreme pressure on detainment facilities as well as on Iraq's fragile, developing judicial system. The New York Times reported on February 14 that more than half of the 26,000 detainees in US custody are still awaiting trial - many having been imprisoned for years.
Information Clearing House
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 by Agence France Presse
US Supreme Court Throws Out Wire-Tapping Case
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a bid by journalists and professors to challenge the legality of the US administration’s wire-tapping program.
The program, brought in after the September 11, 2001 attacks, allows US national security agencies to monitor suspect telephone calls and emails between the United States and overseas without first obtaining a judge’s order.
In 2006 journalists and teachers filed a suit against the program maintaining it violated their right to privacy, saying because they had regular contacts with the Middle East, their freedom of expression would be restrained.
They specifically targetted the National Security Agency in the case which has now come before the country’s highest court.
A lower court judge initially ordered an end to the program immediately, but the appeals court in July overturned that ruling saying the plaintiffs had not proved that their foreign communications were being monitored.
On Tuesday the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, as usual without giving a reason, thus upholding the appeals court ruling.
Also see: Supreme Court Won't Review Bush Domestic Spying Case
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021908B.shtml
James Vicini, reporting for Reuters, writes, "The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a legal challenge to the warrantless domestic spying program President George W. Bush created after the September 11 attacks."
And from Britain another case of a post 9/11 detainee Lofti Raissi who was innocent but no one really wants to say they are sorry for this or give him appropriate compensation for putting his life in ruins.As for the general public in Britain or the United States or even Canada don't really want to know about it.
At Information Clearing House 'I Lost My Career, My life And My Dignity'
Last week, the Court of Appeal ruled that Lotfi Raissi could claim compensation for his arrest and imprisonment after being wrongly accused of training 9/11 pilots. Here, in his first interview since the landmark decision, he tells of his prison hell, nervous collapse and the terrible toll his ordeal has had on his personal and professional life
By Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
17/02/08 "The Observer" -- - Lotfi Raissi seemed destined to become one of the most reviled men in history. A pilot who had trained in the US before moving to England, he was the first person to be accused in connection with the 11 September attacks. He was alleged to be one of its chief ringleaders, teaching the 9/11 terrorists how to fly and crash planes into buildings. It's hard to think of a more damaging accusation. Harder still when Raissi, whose chubby face and small, smiling eyes makes him seem younger than his 33 years, was wholly innocent.
But this did not stop him spending almost five months in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London after the American authorities told their British counterparts of Raissi's 'involvement' in the worst terrorist attack in US history. 'It was appalling,' Raissi said yesterday as he tried to live a normal family life, meeting his brother for a family lunch followed by watching the Manchester United-Arsenal FA Cup tie. 'I was guilty until I proved my innocence.'
Last week, three judges at the Court of Appeal ruled he should be allowed to renew his bid for compensation from the government, overturning a decision by the High Court last year. 'I had faith in the judiciary system,' Raissi said. 'Thank God justice is what I got.'
and : ... To understand how damaging the accusations were against Raissi, it is necessary to understand his background. 'My family back home in Algeria have been fighting terrorism for the past 15 years,' he said. 'My uncle is chief of an anti-terrorist branch. We abhor terrorism in any shape or form in our family. This is very damaging for us.'
The reference to 'us' is a telling one. Raissi is angry not for what happened to him but because of the shame it brought on his family. Their dignity, he says, has been taken away.
As for any real evidence it didn't matter the authorities needed scape-goats after 9/11 who else to blame for their possible failure in their Intel ptior to 9/11 :
In bringing his claim for compensation, Raissi argues that he was arrested chiefly because he was Algerian, Muslim and Arab, an airline pilot - someone who effectively ticked the boxes of an identikit terrorist.
'I was arrested because of my profile,' he said. 'Why didn't they arrest the instructors who actually trained the terrorists?'
The Court of Appeal's judgment on Raissi's arrest, and the refusal to grant him bail, was damning. 'Viewed objectively, it appears to us to be likely that the extradition proceedings were used for an ulterior purpose, namely to secure the appellant's detention in custody in order to allow time for the US authorities to provide evidence of a terrorist offence,' the three judges hearing his case concluded.
But the judges were most scathing about the role of the British authorities. 'We consider that there is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that the police and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] were responsible for serious defaults.' It is difficult to imagine a more damning assessment.
The ruling also shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the way Britain and the United States trade intelligence and raised troubling questions about the two countries' relationship when it comes to fighting terrorism. Why did Britain listen to the US? Why was it so eager to arrest Raissi, when even the American authorities had urged Britain only to make 'discreet' inquiries into his background.
And for update on the Iraq Refugee crisis see article: From Wiredispatch.com,UN says Iraqi refugees need more help
UN Refugee Chief Says World Community and Iraq Government Must Do More to Help Refugees, Feb. 18, 2008
But the world in general does not give much thought to the Iraqis killed or wounded let alone those who have become refugees. It reminds me of the plight of Jewish refugees before WWII in Germany. Hitler said to the world take them and the world for the most part said no. That is to the everlasting shame of the West. Leaders of these countries were fearful of letting too many Jews into their countries since they believed the Jews were untrustworthy and had nothing to contribute to their societies. Others claimed that allowing Jews in would lead to a rise of anti-Semitism. Other countries in the West at that time were almost as anti-Semitic as were the Nazis. Some people believed that the issue of refugees would change after the war but it didn't that much.Most counties these would just like to build bigger and better walls to keep out what they see as undesirables.
But what happen to America's promise on the Statue of Liberty of welcoming your poor , hungry and huddled masses!
Now the people in Western Nations fear and hate all Muslims and Arabs. But it is up to those in power in such cases to appeal to their peoples sense of decency and compassion for other human beings.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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