The Body Snatchers

Monday, 14 November 2005

Just when you think the sick and sinister Bush gangsters have hit bottom, they blow a hole in the floor and drag us down even deeper.

I will be writing on the Senate's evisceration of habeas corpus in this week's upcoming Moscow Times column, but meanwhile, below is an excellent article by Sabin Willett in the WP, Detainees Deserve Court Trials, which sums up the case well. Meanwhile, David Cole, in Slate, demolishes the double standard that Bush is employing to torture his foreign captives while claiming that he is not violating U.S. laws against torture: Who They Are: The Double Standard That Underlies Our Torture Policies.

The excerpts below from Willett's article give us a picture of Bush's draconian powers at work, crushing the life of a captive who has already been officially certified as innocent, but still remains trapped in Bush' gulag:

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus...

He has no visitors save his lawyers. He has no news in his native language, Uighur. He cannot speak to his wife, his children, his parents. When I first met him on July 15, in a grim place they call Camp Echo, his leg was chained to the floor. I brought photographs of his children to another visit, but I had to take them away again. They were "contraband," and he was forbidden to receive them from me...

In a wiser past, we tried Nazi war criminals in the sunlight. Summing up for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson said that "the future will never have to ask, with misgiving: 'What could the Nazis have said in their favor?' History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. . . . The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength."

The world has never doubted the judgment at Nuremberg. But no one will trust the work of these secret tribunals.

Link Here