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US cuts plans for Guantanamo prosecutions

RT |June 11, 2013

The US is scaling back its Guantanamo prosecutions from 36 to 20 or less, admitting that it lacks the evidence to convict many of the detainees of international war crimes.

Of the 166 detainees held at the prison camps, few have viable charges to face war crimes tribunal. Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor for the tribunals, told Reuters that the 36 detainees the US initially sought to prosecute was an “ambitious” number.

The Guantanamo Review Task Force completed a review in 2010 that made this determination, but Martins said no more than 20 detainees have viable charges that prosecutors could realistically pursue. Seven of these have already undergone their trials, and six are facing pretrial hearings this week and next.

The drastic reduction of prosecutions comes in light of the dismissal of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden whose conviction was overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last October. Hamdan had been convicted by a US military commission of providing material support to al-Qaeda terrorists, but the appeals court decided that this was not a crime under international rule of law at the time that Hamdan worked for bin Laden.

The US Congress in 2006 passed the Military Commissions Act, which defines an “unlawful enemy combatant” as someone “who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant”. The appeals court concluded that this law could not be applied retroactively, and Hamdan’s charges were dismissed.

Hamdan had already finished his sentence and returned to Yemen when his charges were thrown out, but the court ruling caused Guantanamo prosecutors to give up on many of the other cases they initially sought to pursue, Martins told Reuters.

Although some of the detainees facing war crimes tribunal are already known, Martins did not identify them all by name.

On Monday, US military prosecutors filed charges against Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi for a war crime coined “perfidy”, claiming that he coordinated a series of suicide attacks on US and allied troops and civilians in Afghanistan. Army Lt. Col. Chris Callen, a lawyer appointed to defend al-Hadi, told AP that he would go over the charges with the detainee on Tuesday.

Pretrial hearings will also begin next week for five prisoners accused of being involved in the planning of the September 11, 2011 terrorist attacks, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Pretrial hearings are currently underway for Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian man accused of directing a number of suicide attacks, including the bombing of the USS Cole, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors.

Both Nashiri and Mohammed are facing the death penalty, but of the 166 detainees still held at Guantanamo, only 20 may ever be prosecuted.

June 12, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ex-CIA Officer Defends Destruction of Torture Videos

By Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky | AllGov | April 27, 2012

In his memoir coming out this month, the Central Intelligence Agency officer who ordered the destruction of the CIA’s torture tapes defends his actions, saying he was erasing “some ugly visuals.”

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of the CIA’s secretive interrogation and detention program during the George W. Bush administration, had 92 tapes destroyed in 2005 after the media exposed the controversial program targeting ‘al-Qaeda’ and other ‘suspected terrorists.’

“I wasn’t going to sit around another three years waiting for people to get up the courage,” Rodriguez wrote in his book, Hard Measures.

He adds that he was “just getting rid of some ugly visuals.” Rodriguez was concerned with protecting the identities of the agents who could be seen in the videos and with the negative effect on the reputation of the CIA if the truth came out. He continues to seem clueless about the intent of the United States Constitution.

He even went so far as to write that “I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled ‘torturers’ by the president of the United States.” The irony of torturers being upset at being called torturers seems to have escaped Rodriguez.

Made at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the tapes showed the waterboarding of ‘terrorists’ Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri.

President Barack Obama ordered an investigation of the program and the tapes. But the U.S. Department of Justice decided to not pursue charges against Rodriguez or any other CIA agent.

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Glenn Greenwald:

… Destruction of these tapes was so controversial because it seemed so obviously illegal. At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the U.S. Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”). …

April 28, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment