Gitmo’s Last Honest Man

[struggle4progress]

Views > August 16, 2007
By H. Candace Gorman

In late June, a brave whistleblower submitted a devastating affidavit to the Supreme Court, which prompted the court to reverse itself and hear the latest Guantánamo cases challenging the Military Commissions Act. Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham’s affidavit exposed Guantánamo’s kangaroo tribunals for the sham that they are. Luckily, the only tribunal on which Abraham sat considered the case of my client, Abdul Al-Ghizzawi.

Abraham, a California lawyer in the Army Reserves, was assigned to the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) in 2004. He served as an inter-agency go-between, compiling information on Guantánamo’s prisoners from various government offices. The information was gathered into a dossier and presented as evidence to the combatant status review tribunals, which would review the file and determine whether a prisoner should be classified as an enemy combatant.

As he became more familiar with this process, Abraham became increasingly alarmed. He found that the “evidence” was generally gathered by inexperienced staff with little legal or intelligence training. He got no assurance that he was given access to all available evidence on a detainee. Officials refused to say whether exculpatory evidence existed or was being withheld, despite government testimony before Congress and filed documents in the courts swearing that all exculpatory evidence was reviewed. ~snip~

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3291/gitmos_last_honest_man/

[ThomCat]

1. Wow. That shows, conclusively

that our military rigged the system to make sure everyone was labled an enemy combattant regardless of any rules of due process they had to fake or work around.

You're guilty because they want you to be.
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