Heckuva job, guys:
A former military prosecutor said in a declaration filed in federal court yesterday that the system of handling evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay is so chaotic that it is impossible to prepare a fair and successful prosecution.
Darrel Vandeveld, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, filed the declaration in support of a petition seeking the release of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who has been held at the military prison in Cuba for six years. Jawad was a juvenile when he was detained in Kabul in 2002 after a grenade attack that severely wounded two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their interpreter.
Vandeveld, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the lead prosecutor against Jawad until he asked to be relieved of his duties last year, citing a crisis of conscience. He said the case has been riddled with problems, including alleged physical and psychological abuse of Jawad by Afghan police and the U.S. military, as well as reliance on evidence that was later found to be missing, false or unreliable.
Vandeveld said in a phone interview that the “complete lack of organization” has affected nearly all cases at Guantanamo Bay. The evidence is often so disorganized, he said, “it was like a stash of documents found in a village in a raid and just put on a plane to the U.S. Not even rudimentary organization by date or name.”
Keep this in mind the next time you see someone saying that all Obama needs to do to close Gitmo is to “let the innocent ones go free.” There really is nothing that the Bush administration has touched that they didn’t turn into a complete hash.
El Cid
You’re talking about a group of anti-Constitutional thugs and pants-peeing worshipers who think the actual idea of fair trials is at best suspicious and at worst part of some gay liberal suicide pact.
For as long as I can remember, the right wing of this nation has been pushing the notion that fair trials are something done out of a weak-willed sympathy for the accused, rather than anything a society might want to do out of basic self-respect.
Xenos
Obviously, they never intended to properly organize prosecutions: if they had, they would have been careful to document and organize the evidence. Either that, or they wanted to let the evidence be a mess, so they could shift the blame onto the prosecutors themselves when the cases came up for disposition.
D-Chance.
Hell, let them all go free.
The guilty ones will undoubtedly go back to killing Americans. We’ll get them the second time around…
sgwhiteinfla
You know I saw Pat "kill em all" Buchannan on Morning Joe saying there were some "Hannibal Lecters" at GITMO and I had to laugh. We don’t even know what most of the prisoners in GITMO are there for. THAT’S the biggest problem. We have kept them prisoner for so long with out even charging them that you have to wonder if anybody even remembers why the picked up some of them in the first place, especially if the documentation is as chaotic as Vandeveld says it is. For all we know many of them might actually be innocent. I mean we have detained and tortured teh wrong guy before .
One more thing, I have seen pundits making fun of sleep deprivation being labeled torture. Now if its for a few days then no its not a big deal. But as someone who has had clinical insomnia I can tell you that long term sleep deprivation might be the worst form of torture you can experience. Not only that, lack of sleep affects your health and body functions including your heart rate. I just wonder why ass clowns like Scarborough and Buchannan won’t allow themselves to be waterboarded like Hitchens did or subjected to sleep deprivation for a week if they are so sure its not torture. Well I don’t really wonder, I know its because cowardly lion is the one that roars loudest.
Robin G.
Obviously, Obama’s trying to think of a way to have his cake and eat it too on this one — is there any way to wipe the slate clean and have real prosecutions? I can see why the new administration is trying to make that happen, I really can. But it’s pretty much impossible.
Let’s say you’ve got a credible eyewitness who says he saw Bob robbing a liquor store. Officer Steve takes Bob into custody, and breaks an unresisting Bob’s arm with a nightstick while he’s being questioned. Is Bob guilty? Yeah, probably. Is Bob going to go free? Yes. Because clear evidence of police brutality will pretty much guarantee a case gets tossed. And there are reasons it works that way — if it didn’t, there would be no reason not to break Jimmy’s leg when you’ve got a fuzzy security camera, or Susan’s ribs when she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Roland’s skull because he looked at you funny.
It would be great if there was some way out of this, but the fact of the matter is, Bush and Co. have screwed the pooch on this so badly that if we don’t release these guys, there’s no reason not to do the exact same thing in the future.
Xenos
@sgwhiteinfla:
You could sell tickets. I, for one, would buy them.
sgwhiteinfla
Here is what it comes down to;
ricky
I say move em all to Mississippi and give em jobs pasting the "it’s just a theory" stickers in all the science books that reference evolution.
SpotWeld
These prisoners were supposed to be a huge information resource for the "War on Terror" that was being fought in the Middle East.
The whole justifaction for the amount of time, money and resources invested in Gitmo was that it was for the good of the Nation…
And now it seems that the Bush administration did the "hard work" of deciding it was "a job someone needs to do", then handwaved a few friends into positions of responcibility and just asssumed it was taken care of. And then a bunch of low ranking workers just tried to do the best they could with whatever they could get thier hands on. (All the while a bunch of loud guys were yelling how important it was they "do the job right".)
Our nation was being run like a crappy frat house’s "rush week" party.
Rick Taylor
Of course if killers end up going free and killing again because officials appointed by the previous administration mishandled the evidence, it will be the fault of liberals for insisting on requiring evidence before locking people up.
John PM
John, I am not sure what you mean by this statement. Do you mean to say that Obama cannot let the "innocent ones" go free because we do not know who is innocent, and thus we need to continue keeping the prisoners in Gitmo?
Unfortunately, as Robin G. points out, the only choice is to let them all go, if we cannot prosecute them. Might there be some truly bad actors in there? Probably (although we do not know for certain). What is truly amazing about this situation is that the system at Gitmo was set up just the way that Bush, Cheney, et al, wanted, and they still cannot bring these cases to trial, let alone be assured of convictions. Was that your point?
wilfred the shoe throwing Norwegian
Well, ok, but only if they’re brown skinned Muslims.
And:
Now what? Isn’t something supposed to happen, or does it just disappear like the Olmert-Bush story?
gopher2b
Well, by now, even the ones that were innocent will take up terrorism. Well played, Mr. Bush; genius really.
Comrade Dread
"Well, thank God we didn’t let professional law enforcement investigators handle find evidence, build cases, locate and detain terrorists, because…"
I’m trying to think of a way to finish that statement that isn’t a variation of:
"then we couldn’t whip America up into a needless frenzy to win elections, rape the Constitution and the treasury, and engage in our big man dominatrix fantasies."
I’ve got nothing.
bago
I hear that Afghani Hash will fuck your shit up.
TenguPhule
I think this could be part of the problem.
Let them go free where?
It seems we can’t even fucking keep track of where many of these guys originally came from.
Though personally, I say arm them to the teeth and let them go outside Malkin’s house.
maxbaer (not the original)
I understand there’s a ranch in Crawford that’s for sale.
MobiusKlein
Since when is it a crime to attack a soldier during war?
Stefan
Since when is it a crime to attack a soldier during war?
Good point. Look at what Jawad was charged with: "…he was detained in Kabul in 2002 after a grenade attack that severely wounded two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their interpreter."
If, as conservatives so often reminded us, this is a war and not a police operation, then the customs of war must apply, and in a war how can it be a crime for one side to attack and wound soldiers on the other side?
MobiusKlein
Well, Mobius, you have forgotten a few cases.
Like if you attack a soldier while you were in truce mode, or disguising yourself as a Red Cross member to sneak in and attack folks, or attacking with banned weapons, or killing folks who have already surrendered.
But in general, no.
BC
No one organized the evidence because their understanding was that, once at Guatanamo, no one left – except in a box. And even then, they would just be buried by the prison with just a number to mark the grave (like other American prisons). So why spend time and effort to keep evidence in any kind of order? I always thought of Guatanamo as the US Bastille – one could be sent there on order of the executive, there was no recourse, no forum for a person to protest or present evidence. The use of letres de cartres (my French sucks) was one of the reasons for the French Revolution. But I think Bush and Cheney saw the powers of the president as vast as those of Louis XIV. Which means they really were contemptuous of the Constitution.
John Glad
The problem with Jawad’s case, if you read the prosecutor’s entire statement, is not just that Jawad was mistreated, it’s that the prosecutor began to believe that Jawad was very likely innocent, and that six years had elapsed in which Jawad was given no trial, not even a chance to prove his own innocence. Instead, this juvenile (16 at the time he arrived at Gitmo) was mistreated and spent most of his six years at Gitmo in solitary confinement. That’s the gist of it. The kid is probably innocent, a judge has found that he was tortured, and he’s been held for six years. What kind of "free" society would allow this sort of thing?
kay
Vandeveld is one of SEVEN prosecutors who have resigned rather than continue to ignore the gross abuses at Guantanamo.