[Peace-discuss] Outrage

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From today's NYT.  This outrageous behavior by the government is 
patently unconstitutional and violates elementary principles of 
democracy and the rule of law.  But our representatives are silent. The 
congressional Democrats are in the position of those Germans who passed 
the Enabling Act in 1933 or the Russian officials who stood by at the 
Moscow trials in 1936 -- I hope history treats the Durbins and Obamas in 
the same way.  Senate Democrats could have stopped the Military 
Commissions Act -- test votes showed that they could sustain a 
filibuster, but chose not to, for fear that they would be attacked at 
election time (and because they support the war, as they will show by 
voting more money for it in the new year). They contented themselves 
with casting a vote against the bill, which they knew to be ineffective, 
rather than taking the effective parliamentary action available to them. 
  Since they failed to uphold the constitution as they were sworn to do, 
they should at least have the decency to resign. --CGE]


For Guantánamo Review Boards, Limits Abound
By TIM GOLDEN

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — At one end of a converted trailer in the American 
military detention center here, a graying Pakistani businessman sat 
shackled before a review board of uniformed officers, pleading for his 
freedom.

The prisoner had seen just a brief summary of what officials said was a 
thick dossier of intelligence linking him to Al Qaeda. He had not seen 
his own legal papers since they were taken away in an unrelated 
investigation. He has lawyers working on his behalf in Washington, 
London and Pakistan, but here his only assistance came from an Army 
lieutenant colonel, who stumbled as he read the prisoner’s handwritten 
statement.

As the hearing concluded, the detainee, who cannot be identified 
publicly under military rules, had a question. He is a citizen of 
Pakistan, he noted. He was arrested on a business trip to Thailand. On 
what authority or charges was he even being held?

“That question,” a Marine colonel presiding over the panel answered, “is 
outside the limits of what this board is permitted to consider.”

Under a law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in October, 
this double-wide trailer may be as close to a courtroom as most 
Guantánamo prisoners ever get. The law prohibits them from challenging 
their detention or treatment by writs of habeas corpus in the federal 
courts. Instead, they may only petition a single federal appeals court 
to examine whether the review boards followed the military’s own 
procedures in reviewing their status as “enemy combatants”...

More than a week after the hearing for the Pakistani businessman accused 
of ties to Al Qaeda, a Washington lawyer who had been trying to help him 
told a reporter that he had not even known the session had taken place.

“There is no hint of any kind of due process in this,” said the lawyer, 
Gaillard T. Hunt. “He’s got no right to an investigation. But 
substantively, it really doesn’t matter, because they can always just 
say they have this classified information that he can’t see.”


[The rest of a typically on-the-one-hand-on-the-other NYT articlecan be 
found at <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/us/31gitmo.html?
hp&ex=1167627600&en=dbf746d8d2442429&ei=5094&partner=homepage>.]