1115.org

An AP story that appeared on Sunday manages to encapsulate, in three short paragraphs, much of what is wrong with our whole Guantanamo set-up. Read them, and just think about the situation for a minute or two:

Rahmatullah Sangaryar stood accused of “planning biological and poison attacks on United States and coalition forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan” and of possessing anthrax powder and a liquid poison.

The Afghan detainee said he was captured only with muddy clothes, possessed no anthrax and never planned such an attack. The officer in charge of the panel seemed to grope for a response.

“Do you know of anyone who would accuse you of such an act? This is so serious,” the unidentified officer exclaimed. “I am trying to understand why it is here in front of me, this allegation against you.”

This guy was presumably picked up in Afghanistan a long time ago. After what AP calls “years of indefinite confinement”, we finally get around to giving him some kind of hearing. What becomes abundantly clear is that we have no proof whatsoever to support what we accuse him of, what we have held him in indefinite confinement for all these years.

You would imagine that if a man was accused of possessing “anthrax powder and a liquid poison”, there would be some proof of possession, that these substances were either found on him, or there was evidence to suggest that he had possessed these substances, and had managed to ditch them just before he was arrested. Clearly, that’s not the case here. Somebody accused him at some point. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. We don’t know on what basis. At this point we have no accuser, we have no proof of any kind against him. But we cheerfully held him all these years. We cheerfully denied him any meaningful legal rights.

How ludicrous is it that the unidentified officer in charge of the panel is reduced to asking the accused to explain why these charges have been brought against him?

This is precisely why other countries now sneer at us when we try to claim to be the good guys in this thing we like to call the war on terror. This is precisely why they laugh in our face. We have made a mockery of what we once used to be justifiably proud of — American Justice.

At the (Administrative Review Board panels), conducted in a trailer inside the Guantanamo detention center, detainees are unable to confront those who have made statements against them. They are not provided with attorneys. The Bush administration has denied the Guantanamo detainees access to civilian courts and only three are charged with war crimes under a new military commissions system that has already run into a legal snarl.

“I am entering the fifth year,” detainee Hamoud Abdullah Hamoud Hassan al-Wady of Yemen told his panel. “I want to see American justice. Where is it?”

Certainly not at Guantanamo, that’s for sure. Not at the Justice department either, it looks like. And if Alberto Gonzales knows where they buried the body, he sure as heck isn’t going to tell.