habeas schmabeas

This American Life replayed their Jack Hitt Habeas Schmabeas piece this week, primarily because it recently won a Peabody Award. Listening to it again was even more painful than the first time it ran, because these criminals are still in office, and many of the innocents are still locked up in Guantanamo.

To illustrate how insane and Kafka-esque our Guantanamo gulag is, just read this from the Washington Post last week:

More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers.

We officially cleared 82 Guantanamo prisoners of any wrongdoing, but can't released them. Nice to live in hell for five years and then to be told "sorry, our bad, but we can't let you go now because you're tainted and nobody wants you."

Not unlike a raped woman in a fundamentalist community becoming a non-person while her attacker goes free, we have forever branded these men as terrorists to their governments and as potential traitors to their communities (why would they have been released if not to become stooges for the Americans?). Yet the righteousness which shields our national conscience will not be penetrated by anything approaching shame, or even mild chagrin.

Here are a few excerpts from Habeas Schmabeas, but go listen to or read it all:

HITT: [C]onsider the case of [attorney Baher] Azmy's client, Murat Kumaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing.

AZMY: ... In Kurnaz's case, there are five ir six statements saying, "There's no evidence of any connection with Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States..." Over and over and over again.

HITT: But here's the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His Personal Representative* doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it. And Kurnaz himself doesn't even know about it...

But wait. There's more. The reason they're holding him? A friend of his named Sulcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's 2 years after Kurnaz got picked up. ...

Kurnaz in in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn't become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.

AZMY: Yeah, he's walking around in Germany; I've met him.

* The Guantanamo prisoners' lawyers are not allowed to attend their clients' Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Each prisoner is appointed a military "Personal Representative."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~

HITT: The problem with creating an offshore legal limbo, where there's no habeas proceeding to separate the Al Qaeda fighter from the comedy writer, comes during interrogation. If we've labeled them as terrorists, then that's how they get treated. Joshua Colangelo-Bryan is a lawyer...who volunteered at Guantanamo. He represents Jumah Al Dossari... [T]he government simply states that [Al Dossari]'s Al Qaeda, and as proof lists the various places he's been: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan, the Pakistan border. Supposedly he was fighting in some of those places, but the government provides no evidence of that. They don't quote witnesses. Nobody's on record saying he's Al Qaeda...

COLANGELO-BRYAN: The military offers no allegations as to when Jumah was supposedly in Tora Bora. It says nothing about what he supposedly was doing. Simply that at some point in history, he was present in that place. Now, Jumah says that he has never been to Tora Bora... Absent some evidence of some involvement in terrorist activity, I simply don't know how you can call someone a terrorist.

HITT: We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Jumah Al Dossari. Colangelo-Bryan met with him many times and catalogued what was done to him. Al Dossari said that Americans forced him to the ground and urinated on him. We put our cigarettes out on him. We shocked him with an electric device. We spat on him. We poured a cup of hot tea on his head. We told him, "We brought you here to kill you." We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left him in a frigid, air-conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold him forever, that we would take him to Egypt to be tortured. On a different day, we chained him to the floor and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual blood on his body. When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face... We videotaped the entire episode."

I appreciate Hitt's use of the pronoun "We" throughout the piece, because We are all responsible for Guantanamo. It was conceived and its merciless mission has been executed by Us, by the long arm of the American electorate through the agency of the Executive Branch. Yes, Bush may have been put in originally by the Supreme Court, but where was the great plurality taking to the streets to denounce his vicious folly? And where was the robust and invulnerable majority vote to kick his ass out of office in 2004?

Where are the mass demonstrations for impeachment? Not just a few hundred or a couple of thousand here or there, but large enough to fill the Washington Mall and demand that Bush, Cheney, Torquemada and their Kyle Sampson-ite minions be hauled up for impeachment and trial? A multitude that even Pelosi and Reid cannot dismiss?

We all may be wearing the blue dress now, but we're also wielding the burning cigarette, and holding on to the dog leash.