Habeas Court Frees Guantanamo Detainee

Technically,



He can petition for release but is not yet legally released; the gov't could try and trump up some new charges or something on him.

Here's the thing - this guy should go free. There was never any reason to detain him in the first place. Why was he there?



He's linked to a group that has some ties to AQ; and that's enough to throw someone in jail for 6 years?

A fine example of the wisdom of the recent SC ruling.

Cycloptichorn

True. I was just trying to capture the practical essence of the ruling in a headline.

Looks like we invited Chinese intelligence to Guantanamo to interrogate this guy, and tortured him on behalf of the Chinese interrogators:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4894921

What is your opinion on this news story Oralloy? I am confused as it seems you are giving mixed messages.

I think we are seeing the result of the idea of Bush's famous words of "you are either for us or against us" put into practice. If a detainee is any way loosely connected to AQ apparently they could be held withot charge for ever without a defense even if they never actually did anything other than being associated with in some kind of way with AQ in whatever means possible including torture. We have even held family members in the hopes of getting information including under aged children. Every now again I imagine they got lucky and got some information out of them, but on the whole according to most reports I have read they did not.

If a person thinks the price of security for Americans excuses all evil then I suppose they would see nothing wrong with the above. However, the way I have read it, the ends have not matched up with the means enough to justify all this even if security justified these actions in the first place; which it does not.

I personally believe either we have rules and believe in them even in extraordinary times or we don't. What good are rules if you can break them when you feel the need?

I think this guy should have been charged at some point before six years with adequate representation and a trial should have been held to determine his status as a prisoner as the GC convention has stated people should do in war times in which we signed off on. Thank goodness the Supreme Court has finally ruled on this. Apparently he had no intention to harm us and didn't do anything himself but he was associated however loosely with AQ. The GC says we can hold prisoners during the times of conflict, but how long are we going to be in conflict? I see no end because I don't see all of AQ giving all up all thought and intention of harming those in US therefore we will always be at war with them. They need to regroup on trying to figure this all out.

I see nothing wrong with trying to get information out of a prisoner but if after so long you get nothing then torturing a prisoner is not the answer or else we could do so in are own system here in the US. For example; lets say a we detain a suspect a in a kidnapping of at least one or two innocent people. Let's say there was a bomb set to go off pretty soon as well. After trying to get information out of him for hours; they get nothing. They are not then free to torture the suspect even though lives hang in balance. Those are our rules in the United States, even though in my example a bomb is set to go off and perhaps dozens of people or more are at definite risk, by law we would not be able to torture the information out of him or her. The reason we have those laws is to protect the innocent. What if that person was not the real one who kidnapped people and had a bomb set to go off and we tortured him or her in the attempt to get information not only would we be committing a grave act of injustice against a person (innocent or not) but we would be wasting time trying to catch the real guilty person.

I always thought these were established understood concepts before this administration (and those that defend this administration) in the US. The very fact we have to debate about it (due process; torture...) at all is a testament in and of itself to my mind. It's like in our understandable zeal to catch those who would harm us we have become like those who would harm us and justify our actions by saying they would have done the same so they do not deserve due process or protections form being tortured.

I could go on as is probably obvious :wink: but I would just keep repeating my same my points.

You are reading me correct. I have a lot of mixed and contradictory views on the matter.

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My opinion of torture depends on who the torture victim is. For the 20 or so high-level members of al-Qa'ida who were involved with 9/11, I am all for torturing them.

But the vast majority of people we tortured were low-level grunts or even innocents. I'm against that torture.

On the question of prosecuting Americans who tortured those low level grunts, I'm nominally for it. However, I note that few people are punished when they torture or commit other war crimes against Americans, and I don't like a double standard where only Americans get punished for committing crimes. So as long as our enemies' war crimes tend to go unpunished, I'm not in any hurry to punish Americans who commit war crimes.

I'd actually like to see us join the International Criminal Court, because I believe the ICC would prosecute crimes against Americans with as much vigor as they prosecute crimes committed by Americans. I think I'm in the minority on that view however, and we probably won't be joining the ICC anytime soon.

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On the question of the habeas proceedings, I'm for them, but I don't think they are as big as deal as most do.

We do have the right to hold captured enemy fighters until the end of the war, and if we can show to a habeas court that the guy was a captured enemy fighter. I expect the court to send him back into detention for the duration of the war. If the court finds that we made a mistake in considering someone an enemy fighter, it would be right for them to release him.

I don't think this war will last forever, but we have the right to detain captured enemy fighters for the duration of the war even if it does.

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About a third of the Guantanamo detainees are people the US government already thinks are innocent, but we can't deport them because no other country will take them. I have no idea what the habeas courts with do with those, and am not sure what I think should be done with them.

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This Chinese guy that the habeas court just ruled on is an even more complicated situation. There is a Chinese Muslim province that the Chinese government is persecuting much in the same way they persecute the Buddhist culture of Tibet.

China has declared resistance groups from that province to be terrorist organizations, and we accept that designation without question in exchange for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror.

We have a couple dozen of these Chinese Muslims in our custody, and because we accept China's declaration that they are terrorists, we hold them at Guantanamo, let Chinese government agents come to Guantanamo and interrogate them, and torture them at the behest of those Chinese agents. However, we don't actually consider these Chinese Muslims to be threats to the US.

This is sort of a situation like we often found ourselves in during the Cold War, where we sometimes had to side with a bad guy in order to further the fight against the Soviets.

Anyway, since the evidence is clear that this guy was not actually fighting the US, the habeas court found no cause to detain him as a captured enemy fighter. What happens next though, I don't know. If we deport him back to China, his kidneys will be on the open market within a day. If we free him, China might stop cooperating in the war on terror.

Here is a link to the ruling:

http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200806/06-1397-1124487.pdf

They had to wait for a declassified version before they could release it.