Today a Kos diaryist discovers the story of Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld , who resigned his commission rather than continue an unjust prosecution, and then says of the attacks Vandeveld has faced from the government since: Vandeveld, once lead prosecutor in seven military commissions cases, bravely resigned in protest and has endured a smear campaign courtesy of the Office of Military Commissions. It's not hard to understand why more whistleblowers aren't coming forward to bring to light inappropriate behavior in the flawed military commissions system. The problem? Our Kos diaryist has not been paying attention, or she would have known about other such unsung heroes as Rear Admiral Jane Dalton Colonel Morris Davis Major David J. R. Frakt Colonel Stephen Henley All of which were covered here in detail ... four months ago. Some of the people who missed this story are the same folks who keep asking me where Libertarians were when Dubya shredded the US Constitution. The a...

Four months ago I ran a post celebrating the US military JAG officers whose conscience has compelled them to fight against torture, weak evidence, and a morally bankrupt system of military tribunals . It's nice to finally see the MSM catching up to at least part of the story .

From Anti-war.com : Mohammed al-Adahi, a 47 year old Yemeni citizen who has been held by the United States since 2001 on charges stemming from owning a Casio brand wristwatch, has been ordered released by a federal judge today. Judge Gladys Kessler instructed the US government to “take all necessary and appropriate steps” to see to it that Adahi is released “forthwith,” though his failing health and ongoing negotiations with the Yemeni government make it unclear how soon he might be reunited with his family. Officials claimed that Adahi was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, though the sum total of its evidence was that the two met once and Adahi owned a Casio watch, which was somewhat similar to another watch used by al-Qaeda in IEDs. Adahi’s defense was that in 2001 he did meet bin Laden once at an official gathering in Kandahar which he was compelled to attend, but that he had no other contacts with al-Qaeda or the Taliban during his brief visit to Afghanistan. He also admitted to own...

From the ACLU : WASHINGTON – A federal judge today ordered the government to release Guantánamo detainee and American Civil Liberties Union client Mohammed Jawad, who has been illegally detained by the U.S. for almost seven years. The Afghan government has indicated that it is prepared to receive Jawad immediately and unconditionally. U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle gave the Justice Department until August 21 to release Jawad from Guantánamo and transfer him to the custody of the Afghan government. Judge Huvelle also ordered the Justice Department to inform Congress of its plans for returning Jawad to Afghanistan by August 6, and to produce a report on the status of his repatriation by August 24. The following can be attributed to Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project and one of Jawad's lawyers in his habeas corpus case: "Judge Huvelle made clear that Mr. Jawad has been illegally detained and the government has no credible evidence to contin...

There is a very disquieting sense in which, despite the rhetoric of Cairo, President Obama's foreign policy is drifting back into the well-worn (and highly dangerous) ruts of the previous administration. Offered for your consideration, as Rod Serling used to say, are two bizarre and troubling occurrences this week. First, Secretary of State Clinton appears in an interview on ABC's This Week to threaten a possible Iraq-style US invasion of Iran. The transcript : CLINTON: I think it is U.S. policy to the extent that we have alliances and understandings with a number of nations. They may not be formal, as it is with NATO, but I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that, were Israel to suffer a nuclear attack by Iran, there would be retaliation. STEPHANOPOULOS: By the United States? CLINTON: Well, I think there would be retaliation. And I think part of what is clear is, we want to avoid a -- a Middle East arms race which leads to nuclear weapons being in the po...

From the NYT : The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial. The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom. Or maybe I should have said, He's no better than Dick Cheney, since Cheney recently argued that some Gitmo detainees should simply be killed . The idea that we would take detainees, charge them with capital crimes based on evidence we won't show, and then allow them to plead guilty and be executed without a trial represents the full circle breakdown of our society being a government of laws and not of men. There really isn't room for equivocation on ...

OK, Dick's got an idea of what to do with the inmates at Gitmo when we close the prison: kill them. No shit : Former Vice President Dick Cheney sees only two options with respect to detainees in the never-ending war on terror: and keeping them in prison without charges for the rest of their lives is, believe it or not, the more reasonable one. “If you don’t have a place where you can hold these people, your only other option is to kill them,” declared Cheney, who believes that suspects “ought to be held until the end of the conflict,” which he had previously said wouldn’t end in any of our lifetimes. Not much I can add to this.

I'm trying to parse out just what principles the Obama/Holder DOJ is standing up for, as it continues to make the same arguments that Bushco made, now adding Don Rumsfeld to the list of officials it is defending. From The Raw Story : In a brief filed Thursday evening, Obama Justice Department lawyers extended many of the same arguments made by Bush attorneys -- that top government officials have qualified immunity from prosecution and that Guantanamo detainees do not have constitutional rights to due process. The Department of Justice has asserted that a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming the rights of Guantanamo detainees to habeas corpus does not apply to plaintiffs in a case against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld because the plaintiffs were released from prison four years prior to the Supreme Court's decision. "It is fair to say that the current brief that is filed by the new administration supports a lot of the arguments that were made by the previous admin...

... and in that sense Andy Worthington's complete list of the 774 Gitmo detainees may (hopefully) prove sulphuric indeed. You can access the itemized listing here ; and check out Worthington's final comment: I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held – at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total – were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or international terrorism. Put that together with recent admissions --from both military officials and Congressman Jack Murtha--that success in Afghanistan won't involve the 17,0...

... or even rhetoric in front of both houses of the US Congress, when the President reassures the American public that we do not torture. Yeah, and neither did the Bush administration. Two stories. First: William Fisher : While human rights and legal advocacy groups applauded President Barack Obama's decision to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, many immediately raised another thorny question: "What about Bagram?" The answer came as a shock. In a brief filing in federal court last week, lawyers from Obama's Department of Justice said they would adopt the same position taken by the George W. Bush administration – that detainees held at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. The U.S. government is holding more than 600 prisoners at Bagram. Some claim they are victims of "extraordinary rendition" by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), while many more say they have been tort...

... when the Center for Constitutional Rights points out that the internal miliatry investigation of potential abuses at Gitmo was, essentially, a sham: A leading human rights organization charges that, contrary to recent U.S. government reports that found prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, being treated humanely, they are in fact "deteriorating at a rapid rate" due to "harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines." The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a report [.pdf] on the current conditions in Camps 5, 6, and Echo following a press conference convened late last week by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations. In his own report on conditions at Guantanamo, delivered to the White House, Walsh determined that conditions at the base meet the standards of the Geneva Conventions. CCR's report, "Conditions of Confinement at Guantanamo: Still in Violation of the Law," disput...

... which, apparently, is the standard we're using, both here : Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A Bush administration Justice Department official will lead a task force created by President Barack Obama to review the status of suspected terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Matthew Olsen, who was deputy assistant attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush, will lead a task force responsible for recommending how to handle the remaining detainees held in the prison camp, the Justice Department said in a statement today. And here : A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.... The report concluded that the Pentagon was in compliance with...

... in the testimony of Specialist Four Brandon Neely , a young MP at Gitmo. It runs to 15,000 words, including his background material. I have worked with many young men like SP4 Neely. While I am sure, as with any emotional testimony from memory, there will be details that are somewhat off, the whole thing has the ring of absolute personal truth. You need to read this document. Today . An excerpt: Did you witness sexual abuse? The in-processing changed a bit, especially once Delta block was finished. The detainees were still taken off the bus and placed in the holding pin, but instead of walking way to the back of the camp, directly across the holding area was an open spot of the camp where a big tent was put up. And this became the new in-processing area. Now, when they were taken out of the holding area, the escort team would take them to this tent where they would go through the same in-processing, except now there was a doctor who would check their rectum area (we were told the...

OK, first off: Gitmo is a blight on America's honor and needs to be closed. That having been said, President-elect Barack Obama is getting way too much shit from people about his statement that closing down Gitmo is complicated and won't be accomplished in 100 days. What exactly did you expect him to do? If he were to issue an Executive Order closing Gitmo in his first week, he'd have three choices of what to do with the prisoners: 1) Transport them to Federal holding facilities within the US. There is precedent for keeping people months and even years without charges--President Jimmy Carter did it with the Marielista boatlift prisoners, and Reagan, Bush, Clinton all quietly followed suit, leaving them to rot--primarily at Fort Chaffee Arkansas. But given that most of the folks at Gitmo have known identities and already have attorneys, that's not going to work. 2) Find other countries to take them as prisoners. Aside from the moral implications (rendition to countri...