Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Via a story in the BBC sent by a friend: "Guantanamo: Anatomy of a Hearing", we find the Sketchy Bush Era Tribunal court documents of one Guantanamo detainee, Feroz Ali Abbasi, who was captured in Afghanistan, and the government claims was part of an Al Qaeda cell defending the airport. The PDF includes (12 MB) a surreal yet frightening court transcript between a Military Tribunal quasi-super-judgity-entity-power-man (the Tribunal President), the Detainee, and his Personal Representative. It also has a lot of handwritten legal statements from Abbasi.
I personally believe that setting up some kind of parallel shadow military-judiciary structure can only lead to cartoonish super-villainy and a general sense that the Law is about as meaningless as an afternoon in detention. These documents certainly lean that way. They ought to be treated as Prisoners of War, not Alien Pods from the Great Quivering Space Monster, or whatever the fuck bizarre fantasy lies at the sinister heart of the Detainee Rendering machine.
Straight from deep inside the Legal Black Hole, I offer Abbasi's formal declaration that he is indeed, a Prisoner of War, with all the legal implications therein:
The net result is some kind of Kafkaesque Neo-McCarthyism with the tone of the Vice Principal from Hell giving you detention. Includes the memorable quote, as Abbasi questions the legal basis for the invasion of Afghanistan in international law, from a prepared statement:
Tribunal President: "Mr Abbasi your conduct is unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I don't care about International Law. I don't want to hear the words International Law again. We are not concerned with International Law. I am going to give you one last opportunity, for which I am being much more generous and perhaps I shouldn't, but I will give you one last opportunity to address the specifics on the summary of evidence."
This is followed by many handwritten pages, apparently by Abassi from the confines of his cell in Cuba. It reminded me of a guy stuck in detention, complete with flourishes of handwriting and sketched arrows:
(d) anyone charged with an offense is presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law; [a provision, it seems, America has conveniently forgotten.]
But it gets better: "BOING!" is written there in the margin, associated with the statement that
The manner in which petitioner has been treated in Guantanamo Bay, and the "tribunal" that has been organized to try him – described by another respected British jurist, Lord Steyn, as a court that is a "mockery of justice" and that "derives from the jumps of the kangaroo" – cannot pass muster under the most basic and fundamental description of due process.
Further down there, Abbasi states that "I contest that I am properly classified as an 'enemy combatant.'" Finally, then, I will wrap it up with this bit...
In fact the unfounded use of military force, commencing I believe on October 9th 2001, is merely a repeat of the yet again unfounded cruise [missile] bombings of The Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan, an ACT OF WAR I might add, after the Oklahoma bombing to which yet again Usama bin Laden was accused yet again without adequate evidence and yet again was unjustly attacked.
So, recent history has proven that the Terrorist United States of America has had an unjustifiable and unreasonable hate for the Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan. Why so? The very words of your Commander-in-Chief reveal all:
"Crusade."
This point is made even more heinous by the subsequent point that Usama bin Laden possessed a fax line with the Terrorist American government. That though that fax line he was WARNED to the similar purport of, "The Americans are going to bomb in one month's time"! Knowledge only a handful could have possessed, who I would surmise within the upper echelons of the American government itself. Events were true to the news.
There is more to be read. The BBC report does not make clear his fate today. It's the Abassi view from inside the Legal Black Hole.
Posted by HongPong at March 8, 2006 02:20 AM