Homeland Security
False Confessions at Guantanamo
Published October 02, 2009 @ 07:17AM PT
Wrongful conviction cases often follow similar patterns, and all of the warning signs have been present at Guantanamo for years. A federal judge’s decision unsealed last week demonstrates exactly how innocent people have become American captives and the lengths our government is willing to go to obtain false convictions.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered that a Kuwaiti man named Fouad al-Rabiah (left) be freed from Guantanamo, finding that we’ve detained an innocent man for seven years based on false confessions extracted under torture. Her 65-page opinion completely eviscerates the government’s case against al-Rabiah, explaining that American authorities ignored warning signs of his innocence in order to stick to the original story. Blogger and author Andy Worthington gives us an excellent play-by-play review of the frightening case here.
The case is an eye-opening example of the kind of injustice that can occur when we let fear and revenge get the best of our justice system. It’s a deadly recipe: a suspect with some scant circumstantial evidence of involvement meets pressure to get a conviction. We see it again and again in domestic cases. About 25% of the wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing to date have involved false confessions.
Al-Rabiah’s wrongful incarceration follows the same pattern of many of the domestic wrongful convictions, except the interrogation techniques used by the officers (and approved by the Bush administration) were infinitely more aggressive and unjust than any used regularly in American police stations since Jon Burge’s reign of terror on Chicago’s South Side in the 1970s and 1980s.
Below are the facts in al-Rabiah’s case as I understand them:
"Mommy, What Was the Rule of Law?"
Published August 25, 2009 @ 11:03AM PT
As anticipated, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the assignment of a career prosecutor to investigate whether U.S. officials exceeded guidelines provided by the Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) in carrying out so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Those guidelines, known as the "torture memos," were drafted by officials in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). To lead the investigation, Holder appointed veteran prosecutor John Durham of Connecticut, previously selected by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the CIA's destruction of 92 interrogation tapes.
The Washington Post broke the story, reporting that "Durham's mandate ... will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees." The Guardian also described the investigation's scope as "relatively narrow." This announcement indicates that, "as far as this DoJ is concerned, all the torture that occurred within [the torture memos,] was 'legal,'" writes Tapped's Adam Serwer. But Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent see it differently: "Holder did not rule out any course of investigative or prosecutorial action."
So is Holder's announcement a validation of the torture memos? Or does the door remain open to hold the attorney-architects of the torture framework accountable?
It depends, methinks: Will the American people stand up for the rule of law, or will we let torture apologists take the day?
Closing Guantanamo: Setting the Record Straight
Published June 09, 2009 @ 12:52PM PT
If you premise your views on cable "news," then you might be mislead to believe that closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is a national security risk. This could not be further from the truth. The first Guantanamo detainee arrived in New York early this morning, and the world hasn't ended yet.
The facts are clear: (1) maintaining an extra-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay is a clarion call for terrorists; and (2) there is no reason to sacrifice American values and permit endless detentions of criminal suspects outside of our nation's laws.
There's been quite the hullabaloo over what to do with Guantanamo detainees. Losing ground on national security issues, conservative politicians have latched onto the closure of Gitmo as one of the few issues where they can play offense. With scare tactics not unfamiliar to students of witch hunts and the Red Scares, conservatives have mobilized waves of NIMBYs with irrational fears and fabricated threats. And congressional leaders seem to have succumbed to the pressure produced, blocking funding of the President's relocation efforts.
