[Vision2020] The more things change the more they stay the same

[Glenn Schwaller]

I'm not certain that having beaten or not beaten people is really relevant.
Had the detainees at Guantanamo not been beaten or tortured, it would then
have been perfectly OK to hold them indefinitely?  I was under the
assumption (and this could be part of the problem) that creating prisons
outside of the law, holding prisoners without charges, repeatedly
interrogating them with no attorneys present, in short - denying them basic
rights, was a key issue behind the arguments to close Guantanamo.  I think a
little clarification to your statement is needed Sunil.

GS


On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Sunil Ramalingam <
sunilramalingam at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Disgusting.  If we hadn't beaten people to death there this might be
> different.  But we have, and people have been held there before being moved
> to Guantanimo and elsewhere.
>
> Sunil
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:04:24 -0800
> From: vpschwaller at gmail.com
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] The more things change the more they stay the same
>
>
> By NEDRA PICKLER and MATT APUZZO
> WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White
> House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional
> rights.
> In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that
> detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their
> detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
> "The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has
> not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights
> attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected
> better."
> The Supreme Court last summer gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at
> the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their
> detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and
> thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether they, too,
> can sue to be released.
> Three months after the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four
> Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions
> in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S.
> military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them
> without any means to contact an attorney. Their petition was filed by
> relatives on their behalf since they had no way of getting access to the
> legal system.
> The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy
> combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition last
> year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is reviewed
> every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and
> testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.
> After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new
> administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal
> argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for
> itself.
> "They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside
> the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil
> Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.
> The Justice Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay
> because it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held
> as part of a military action. The government argues that releasing enemy
> combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there
> to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.
> The government also said if the Bagram detainees got access to the courts,
> it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in conflicts
> worldwide to do the same.
> It's not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush
> administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week,
> Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which
> the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate
> legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.
> The same day, however, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter cited
> that privilege in asking an appeals court to uphold dismissal of a suit
> accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected
> terrorists to allied foreign nations that tortured them.
> Letter said that Obama officials approved his argument.
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>               http://www.fsr.net
>          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20090221/83221546/attachment.html