Friday, June 30, 2006
Liars, cheaters, knaves
Declan Walsh reports in The Guardian that: "The United States government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days."
Why were they so easy to find? Because one was a senior official in the Karzai government, one was a prominent Afghan known by one and all, and the third teaches at the National Defense University in Washington DC.
This is shameful. Our system of justice is based on the model that no one wants to convict an innocent man, nor even subject him to the anguish of imprisonment a moment longer than is necessary.
We now know that most of the men interned at Guantanamo were innocent, picked up by naive American troops on the word of unscrupulous bounty hunters. In a system of law that claims to to presume that innocence, to make a pretense of searching for the witnesses a man needs to prove his innocence is despicable.
But it gets worse.
As I posted regarding the Hamdan decision at "Avedon Carol's highly-recreational Sideshow, Even more troubling was a discussion at Georgetown, led by Tushnet and Lazarus, in which they explained how Bushco would subvert, evade, or ignore the Supreme Court:
1. Congress could pass a statute contrary to Geneva, authorizing the kangaroo court envisioned by Bush, and effectively withdrawing the US from the Conventions (not to mention the civilized world).
2. The Executive and Congress could collude to pretend to be in the process of enacting legislation, and tell the courts to lay off enforcement until the law can be worked out.
3. The Administration could just continue to hold prisoners, denying them a trial of any kind.
Why can't we just do the right thing...?
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