Gov's GITMO Prosecutor Under Oath: Political Pressure by RenMin [Subscribe]
Tue Apr 29, 2008 at 08:09:37 AM PDT
There are two surprises about this story in the Washington Post this morning: A military prosecutor was willing to go on record, under oath, concerning the abuses of the military commissions kangaroo court set up by the Bush administration, and the Post put it on the front page.
The former terrorism chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, testified under oath that high level Defense Department officials pressured him to bring prosecutions before the elections, for political purposes:
Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value." Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing.
He also testified that the Defense Department's General Counsel stated that acquittal of any of the suspects would be unacceptable:
He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy. "He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "
Finally, his testimony revealed that the Bush administration has no compunctions about using evidence acquired by torture:
Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."
So let's get this straight -- our Government, our country, the United States of America, the City on a Hill, the Last Best Hope for Mankind, has degenerated to this level: we offer show trials, travesties of justice where confessions are coerced by torture, where a guilty finding is a foregone conclusion, and where the charges are brought for political, not legal, purposes. And all of this is done in the name of preserving our liberties from the terrorists.
How does this differ from the Moscow show trials of the thirties, or what goes on in the courtrooms of Castro's Cuba or China?
What does this say about our country, that we haven't initiated mass protests? That a sizeable minority of the public thinks this kind of thing is just fine?
Even if we elect a Democratic President and enhance our majorities in Congress, we are really going to have our work cut out for us in restoring our traditional American values.