Comments (12)

Anonymous wrote on December 11, 2007 7:10 PM:

.....and Durbin didn't lean forward and call Hartmann a bungler and an embarrassment to the uniform because....?

LB52 wrote on December 11, 2007 9:54 PM:

You obviously didn't watch the hearing nor are you familar with the rules:
1. No Secret Trials
2. Right to Remain Silent
3. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt finding by a jury.
4. Defense can put in hearsay evidence.
5. No statements obtained by torture can be used at trial.
6. Right to cross-examine witnesses
7. Right to counsel
8. Right to appeal (mulitiple appeals - including to civilian court).
9. Right to examine evidence
10. More rights than what is given at Nuremburg and the current U.N. courts.

Were you aware of any of that?

Sam wrote on December 11, 2007 9:57 PM:

This is the same guy who wouldn't condemn the Iranians if they waterboarded a US Pilot.

Mary wrote on December 11, 2007 10:14 PM:

They need to start asking the real questions and the hard ones.

Like how it is that the system we should all be proud of held a bipolar London Chef in solitary and abuse for over three years on the undisclosed, anonymous say-so of a man who probably received a nice monetary award for saying that the chef had run an al-Qaeda training camp, except that once information was finally released about the secret claims, it turns out the chef was making omlettes in Mayfair when he was supposed to be the General of an al-Qaeda training camp.

Or ask about how we came to hold, for years, children as young as 11 who were not taken on the battlefield, in any kind of battle, and who were clearly mistakes.

Or how we are supposed to be proud of the treatment of the Chinese Uighurs at GITMO.

No one ever digs in and asks about the illegal war bounties paid for the scalps of dark people with odd names.

Farce - they never even bother with the known and true egregious cases and instead get into stupid nonsense like "wouldn't it be better if we had more convictions of innocent people to show for the time and effot at GITMO?"

The Democrats run from really anteing up and making people come to account and everytime they do - they insure more blood feuds and more hatred because of the assault on morality that they refuse to battle.

Anonymous wrote on December 11, 2007 10:45 PM:

TPM asked on this subject: Can DoD order someone "not" to testify? Sure. Is it legal? Depends: If the DoD knows the witness has war crimes evidence, but will not permit disclosing it, that could be a war crime.

This would be solved if there was a subpoena, under threat of arrest.

Is Congerss up to that, much less enforcing it? Not this Congress. They need to change their interest in enforcing Geneva. ICC is watching.

Anonymous wrote on December 11, 2007 10:48 PM:

LB52 wrote on December 11, 2007 9:54 PM

Your assertions about "rights" granted to the POWs at GTMO were only "recognized" as Geneva obligagtions _after_ many challenges.

Don't pretend for a moment that theyu've always had these legal options. They're still not being charged/tried.

Six years later, and finally the US claims "look at what they have." Look at what work it took for the US to get forced to comply with Geneva.

Not impressive, LB52.

dkm wrote on December 12, 2007 12:39 AM:

I read LB52's post and then reread it to try to figure out what the guy was talking about. I finally concluded, and I may be wrong, that he was trying to say that the prisoners at Gitmo have these rights. The man is absolute proof that there are multiple universes because in this universe the list is totally wrong.

1. The hearings, not trials, are indeed held in secret and the press is not allowed.
2. The right to remain silent only means that they won't slap you in the face for not answering a question.
3. There is no jury, only three military officers, any two of which can sentence you to death.
4. The prosecutor is allowed to use any documentation he wants, even if it is just a guess and the prisoner has no right to question it and even lacks the right to know that it exists. This evidence includes "confessions" obtained by torture at the discretion of the judges.
5. See 4.
6. The prisoner has no right to even know who the witnesses against him are let alone cross examine them.
7. The military will decide who the counsel will be and will have access to all communications between counsel and the prisoner. The counsel's access to the prisoner is also restricted.
8. There are no appeals to civilian courts. The military is the only and last resort.
9. There is no right to even know what the evidence is (grounds of national security) let alone examine it.
10. More rights than were given to Slobodan! Are you serious?!

As I said, there must be alternate universes in operation here because in this one, none of the points made in the previous post by LB52 are valid.

johnnydoughey wrote on December 12, 2007 4:25 AM:

In case anyone is intersted....
This was just another appeasement (for "We the People" hearing in which Congress went through the actions of representing the American public while in fact, doing nothing more than cosmetic beautification.

Once again, our democracy has been screwed and those in power (both Republican mobsters and Democrat mobsters) have... nor will... pay any consequences.

When will "WE the People" get it through our thick skulls that as long as we continue to vote in either Republicans or Democrats... NOTHING WILL CHANGE!!

Even if we were to elect a few good folks into office running on one of the two tickets... they could never get to any position or committee whatsoever whiich could turn things around. The entrenched gangsters will still control the movements and the public will still suffer... right up until the time we no longer have the actual right to vote any longer.

These crooks must have been raised on Monday night wrestling where the two opponents yell and scream and throw each other around for a few minutes while the crowd stands up and hollars and boos and cheers for their own guy.

The two "wrestlers" then go back stage and talk about their performance while the crowd has just given them a couple hundred thousand dollars to get fooled... aand comes back the next week to be fooled again.

Too bad Congress and the Senate aren't just wrestlers capable of nothing more than ripping off a few bucks from customers while entertaining them on a boring evening... instead of destroying an entire nation...IMHO

The Totalizer wrote on December 12, 2007 4:41 AM:

Do Gitmo detainees have a right to a speedy trial, or do they have to be formally arrested before that? Six years of pre-trial detention strikes some of us as excessive.

The Oracle wrote on December 12, 2007 4:49 AM:

"I cannot explain that," replied Hartmann, citing "various legal delays," adding "I'm as disappointed in that as you are."

The only "delay" is that the criminals in BushCo are planning on rolling out show trials (or "show convictions) next year before the November 2008 elections, flooding the airwaves (or at least Faux News) with their "proof" of how tough Republicans are on terrorists, while keeping hidden as much as possible from the public eye.

You can bet that these "convictions" of Gitmo detainees will be played to the max by the right-wing noise machine next year, in an attempt to swing voters to the side of the culture of corruption Republicans.

But any U.S. citizen falling for this devious Republican political ploy next year should probably go have their medication levels checked.

torgeaux wrote on December 12, 2007 10:00 AM:

LB52: Close, but reciting the talking points doesn't earn you points.

1. There are many sessions held outside the presence of the detainee, the public and the press. Secret, no?

2. Right to remain silent AT TRIAL. After coercive interrogations, years of imprisonment with regular questioning, now, now, he gets to not incriminate himself. This is meaningful how?

3. Reasonable doubt is meaningless in a system where hearsay is presumptively admissable, statements of the detainee do not have to be corroborated and the government can withhold information on how evidence was obtained. This allows the government to use evidence that has no showing of reliability, and the rules require the opponent of the evidence to show it's unreliable. Yes, requiring the accused to prove it's untrue is hardly the presumption of innocence as I know it.

4. Defense can also use hearsay. This is regrettably true, but not a good thing.

5. How do you know? The opponent has to first object that it was by torture (with a good faith basis for the objection...which they'll never have, since the prosecution doesn't have to disclose pretty much anything to the defense).

6. Cross-examine, true. But the prosecution is relying on hearsay, so it goes like this: Witness: He told me that he saw the detainee biting the heads off chickens. Cross-examination: Isn't it true that it was too dark? I don't know, he didn't say. Isn't it true that he was 1/4 mile away? I don't know, he didn't say.

7. Counsel. Military counsel that they will never, and have no reason to, trust. Sure, we know that the military defense counsel are doing great work, but why would a detainee know that and trust them? Absent that trust, not much of an attorney-client relationship.

8. Appeal? To a handpicked, made up review court, THEN to the D.C. circuit, and maybe to the Supremes. So, after they've been held for 6 years, then convicted, then held 2 more, then finally get civilian review, they get something meaningful? Perfect.

9. No. The right to examine evidence is so limited as to be meaningless. The government can say, "not relevant" so we aren't allowing access. They can say, National Security, so they can substitute a statement about what the evidence shows. Not meaningful, is it?

10. When the apologists say, "We're better than prior courts that would embarrass us," it says more about them than it does about the system. Better than Uganda is not something the US system used to be proud of.

AC wrote on December 12, 2007 6:03 PM:

Maybe it wasn't used in this hearing, but I've heard GITMO detainees described as "picked up on the battlefield."

It's a term used to bypass any question of innocence -- these guys are obviously "bad guys," the "worst of the worst," etc.

How many of the detainees were captured by way of bounties? This is never addressed. Bounties are an enormous injustice -- not only to the poor innocents who have been betrayed for money, wrongly imprisoned, and who knows what else. When justice is fake and staged, we as a people are denied it.

I think putting the people responsible for 9/11 and other terrorist acts in jail is a really, really good idea. Supposedly, the administration thinks so, too. Unfortunately, it just ain't happening.

If detainee A is truly guilty, but is being treated the same way as innocent detainee B, that is not justice.

Say your local cops suspect two people of the same crime. They can't tell for sure who actually did it, so they put them both away, figuring that the guilty party is in jail, so what the hell. Job well done!

And by the way, I'm not proud of a system that upon learning that someone it has detained for YEARS (and not TV, weight-room, weekend visit kind of detention) is innocent simply kicks them to the curb without explanation or redress, let alone an official apology. Shit, even the DMV will send you a letter if they make a mistake.