1115.org

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Someone forgot to give Guantánamo tribunal judge Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III the memo about how his job is just to quietly produce convictions. Either that, or someone did a lousy job of vetting him before they made him a Guantánamo judge. Because he really doesn’t seem to like performing to the Bush administration’s script:

A military judge in the trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr threatened Thursday to suspend the terror trial unless the prison camp releases a detailed log of Khadr’s treatment in more than five years of detention as an alleged al Qaeda terrorist.

Khadr, 21, is accused of throwing a hand grenade in a July 2002 firefight between U.S. forces and al Qaeda suspects in Afghanistan. A Special Forces medic, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., died of his wounds. Khadr was 15.

His attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, wants the log in a pretrial effort to limit the scope of evidence given to a jury of U.S. military officers at his upcoming trial, expected in late summer. He argues the circumstances of some interrogations would exclude some of his statements from the trial.

Thursday morning, the military judge, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III, agreed with the defense that it should get copies of the log entries from the prison camp’s Detainee Information Management System, or DIMS.

Brownback is believed to be the first war court judge to threaten to ”abate” the proceedings if the prison camp’s command staff does not turn over the evidence.

Brownback must enjoy deeply discomfiting the Bush administration, because he’s been there and done that before. (Or maybe he just has a quaint, quixotic belief in the principles of American justice that is thoroughly at odds with our prevailing Guantánamo philosophy?)

Back in June 2007, Brownback was one of two military judges who decided that they had no option but to dismiss all charges against the first two men to be tried under The Military Commissions Act that was hurriedly passed by Congress at Bush’s insistence. (The reason was the tribunals are empowered only to try “unlawful enemy combatants”, and the Guantánamo detainees had all been designated — very formally, and with great pomp and ceremony — as “enemy combatants”.)

After the hearing, Air Force Maj. Gail Crawford, a military commissions legal expert, said there has been no abatement so far at the war court, which is now receiving pretrial motions in six cases and has charge sheets for seven more in the wings.

”If you can’t get discovery, you can’t go forward,” Crawford said.

Brownback’s ultimate remedy after abatement, she said, would be to dismiss the charges entirely.

And that, of course, will have not just Bush but several other ranking Bushies jumping up and down in apoplectic rage.

So it looks like the government is fixing to comply with the order to turn over the log. In their own inimitable way:

A statement Thursday evening from the prison camps command staff, called the Joint Task Force, or JTF, said the commanders were “working closely with the prosecutors to redact the records for release.”
[…]
”This entails a significant effort to redact information which would put JTF personnel at risk,” the statement added, without elaborating on the nature of the risk.

It isn’t exactly clear why any redaction is necessary:

Brownback noted that Khadr’s defense attorneys — Kuebler and Rebecca Snyder, a civilian Pentagon lawyer — are cleared to see any sensitive national security information that might be included in the log.

Maybe it’s just habit by now, or maybe JTF command staff get penalized if they don’t drag their heels when cooperating with requests like these? Funny how Brownback seems to have anticipated heel-dragging.

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One of the issues that Brownback is going to have to rule on if the trial continues is whether statements made by Khadr to interrogators, both at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo, were obtained by coercion or torture. The entire TWAT chain of command is surely looking forward to that ruling. Brownback sounds like just the judge they would hand-pick to draw the dividing line between coercion and torture.

According to Khadr’s defense lawyers, a criminal investigation by the U.S. army into allegations that Khadr was abused at Bagram was halted in October 2006, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Khadr’s lawyers “are accusing the U.S. government of a cover-up”:

“It appears that the government killed that investigation precisely to keep the allegations or the evidence of Omar’s abuse at Bagram from coming to light,” U.S. Navy Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler told reporters after the hearing.
[…]
Khadr was 15 years old when he was brought to the U.S. base camp at Bagram, Afghanistan, after his capture in a firefight on July 27, 2002. He had been shot twice in the back by U.S. forces.

Khadr claims that during the three months he was imprisoned at Bagram he was interrogated more than 40 times – sometimes brought for questioning on a stretcher.

Kuebler told reporters that before the army investigation stopped, the findings corroborated some of Khadr’s allegations of abuse, including the fact that it was standard policy to chain detainees by their wrists to the top of the cells.

“Picture a 15-year-old boy with those types of injuries being forced with his arms chained like this for extended period of time in Bagram, and think about the effect that would have on him and his willingness to co-operate with interrogators,” Kuebler said.

Two months after Khadr was transferred, Sgt. Joshua Claus, who was Khadr’s chief interrogator at Bagram, was charged and convicted in the death of an Afghan taxi driver while in custody.

Claus, who spent five months in jail for the man’s death, denied allegations of abuse concerning Khadr.

In a sworn affidavit, Khadr also said he was threatened with rape and left short-shackled to a bolt in the floor for as long as six hours at Guantanamo. He says he was so scared that he told interrogators what they wanted to hear.

For the record, just to charge a 15-year old with war crimes — as we have done — violates the Geneva conventions. The treatment he was subjected to at Bagram, where he was brought in on a stretcher, wounded so badly that it was unbelievable he was still alive, is just icing on the cake. Add to that the fact that his chief interrogator was convicted of torturing a prisoner to death, and “plead guilty to playing a role in the routine abuse of captives held in extrajudicial detention in the Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in 2002″. Brownback will rule how he rules on the coercion versus torture issue. But it’s surely a little ironic in light of our treatment of Khadr that we are charging him with war crimes?