Federal Judge Grants Habeas To Gitmo Prisoner Because of Torture
FireDogLake
By: Jeff Kaye
April 21, 2010
…This brings the scorecard to 35 of 48 habeas cases from Guantanamo decided against the government. I don’t know how many of them were due to tortured evidence. One would be too many, but it is far, far more than one. The U.S. released a cascade of evil when it decided it would torture whomever they could get their hands on, all to create a false narrative of fear, of a "homeland" under increasing attack by waves and waves of jihadists, armed with fictional "dirty bombs" and visions of heavenly virgins.…Read the latest story of another innocent granted petition for release from a government that held him for near a decade in a tropical hell because they had no evidence but what they could manufacture by coercion, and, then reflect. Consider that this decision will not allow Mr. Uthman to finally walk out of prison, because the U.S. government doesn’t know what to do with him and prisoners like him. Reflect, then act.…
…Uthman had been captured in the Afganistan/Pakistan border region [allegedly in the general area of Tora Bora, although that was never established] with a large group of others all rounded up en masse. Uthman claims he was a teacher innocently traveling, the DOJ asserted he was a key bodyguard for bin Laden. The evidence proffered against Uthman came almost exclusively from two other detainees, Sharqwi Abdu Ali AI-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali Al Kazimi, who both assert they fabricated the statements in response to severe torture.…
Bush Insider Reveals Guantanamo Deception: Hundreds of Innocents Jailed
CommonDreams
by Bill Quigley
April 20, 2010Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public. Wilkerson said President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover up the mistakes of the administration.
How did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo? In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where Guantanamo was often discussed. It soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”
How was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent? Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S. forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo. The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention.” Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.” As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place”…
The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they [Al-Hajj and Kazimi] made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.
Judge Kennedy made the decision that the two prisoners who fingered this man as being a member of al Qaeda had been recently tortured, so their evidence was thrown out – meaning that evidence obtained under torture is not admissible in court. And also, these men had been tortured.
Having these things discussed in the blogosphere is great — but also disheartening to know that this may be as far as it goes. 99% of the people will never hear about this, or if they do it will be in passing and result in a shrug and “moving on.”