Ghostwriter
Stories like this about all the awful things surrounding the Administration’s attempt to close Gitmo always leave me feeling vague and unsettled. I really don’t have any good way of handling an issue this complex. Though I am certain Guantanamo must be closed, and that keeping it open is much more damaging to our national security than keeping it closed—it can’t be fully closed without dealing with a number of suspects which the government knows are dangerous, but for whom they don’t have conclusive evidence.
I see a lot of progressives simply insisting that all of our detainees be treated like everyone else and let a judge/jury decide their innocence or guilt. I respect entirely the commitment to justice over vengeance that that viewpoint represents, but it’s clear to me that doing so could backfire tremendously and set back progressive goals in regards to treating terrorism suspects with the appropriate legal nuance.
If we can make it through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial in NYC and have him convicted, it sends a great message to other countries, to our judicial branch, and to KSM himself. Convicting someone as a criminal for murder, instead of an enemy warrior for war crimes, is far more demeaning, for all the same reasons that it’s more difficult. I support this trial, and I commend Atty. General Holder for his bravery in making it happen. But if we send all the prisoners through the civil system, there is a significant chance that dangerous people will be released because of inconclusive evidence.
This doesn’t mean they’re innocent; our justice system is to built to set a guilty man free rather than see an innocent man jailed, which is the right attitude, but you’ve seen OJ’s book, right? If that happens to a dedicated jihadist for whom we just cannot prove their guilt conclusively, and there are murders committed as a result, our civilian judicial system’s credibility for handling dangerous suspects will be seriously weakened. It will be a political windfall for neoconservative hawks. We’ll throw all terrorism-related detainees at military commissions forevermore, whether Guantanamo exists or not, conclusive evidence or not, groups like the ACLU will be marginalized, and then we’ll really have something to feel disgusted about.
The root problem here is that for many of these 200some people, our best evidence has been obtained through torture, thanks to the Bush administration. This has hampered our ability to prosecute, has done our nation a tremendous disservice, and now there is no easy solution – no matter what simple perspective many conservatives or progressives might hold on the issue. But with the announcement of KSM‘s NYC trial, the resignation of Greg Craig, and their messenger’s stated commitment today to close it, I remain confident that the Administration is doing its best to find a way out, and will, eventually, get the job done.
1) Why do you read politico? it’s news vomit. they consume the mainstream media and then hurl up bite sized chunks dripped in bile.
2) “it can’t be fully closed without dealing with a number of suspects which the government knows are dangerous, but for whom they don’t have conclusive evidence” that’s an oxymoron. we can’t know and be inconclusive.
3) “set back progressive goals in regards to treating terrorism suspects with the appropriate legal nuance” i’m not sure ‘nuance’ in and of itself was really a goal but justice above ‘wholesale punishment for anyone suspected of terrorism!’ would be appropriate.
4) KSM is as red-handed as a terrorist can be. he’s the easiest to prosecute legally. i’m not sure how you can strive for justice of nuanced legality while applauding a more ‘difficult, demeaning’ conviction. what would send a great message to other countries is not pardoning bush co. and allowing extradition for war crimes on an international stage.
5) “there is a significant chance that dangerous people will be released because of inconclusive evidence” that’s a problem the justice system faces everyday. e tu, the wire? indefinite detention for lack of conclusive evidence isn’t legal under normal circumstances and there should be no exemptions. regardless of whether they were terrorists when they were initially detained, after years of indefinite imprisonment and torture, anyone would become a terrorist when released. you seem to be saying “i like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ unless we can’t prove it but feel it in our gut, then eff the system.”
6) “our best evidence has been obtained through torture” what a nonsense phrase. nothing obtained through torture can be counted as evidence for very good reason.
7) “there is no easy solution – no matter what simple perspective many conservatives or progressives might hold on the issue” it’s hard! stop making suggestions! imprison indefinitely until someone makes the tough decision! I’m not trying to pick on you but you have to have some conclusion other than “Obama’ll figure it out.” This is the same Obama who developed “preventative detention” which made me irate when I heard about it.
as always, one of the best takes on this goes to glenn greenwald
spavis
Nov 16, 10:58pm
google.com
1) Oh, I haven’t found Politico to be that way at all. I’ve read it for a couple years now alongside more mainstream media, and I find them to go into a lot more depth than anyone except perhaps the NYT. They have a lot of access on the Hill and tend to get more candid responses from politicians. I also see them cited as the original source for stories in the mainstream media as regularly as anything else.
2) It’s not an oxymoron – I mean legally inconclusive, which is different. There are all sorts of inadmissible or insufficient evidence (conversations with ordinary people or even high ranking officials in the area who would be too scared to testify come to mind) that still mean something to a counterterrorism agent tasked with keeping the country safe.
3) I don’t think there’s any disagreement there.
4) KSM has also been waterboarded like 180 times. That adds severe difficulty to the trial. Not just because his confessions themselves can be tossed out, but because a judge can call out the government for “outrageous behavior” and simply rule in the defendant’s favor, as the judge in the Gov’t vs. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens trial threatened to do multiple times, and might have if federal prosecutors hadn’t dropped the case. The only reason I’m confident he’s going to be convicted is because he’s being sent to New York City, down the road from Ground Zero. Holder’s placing as much emotional pressure as he can on the proceedings to get a conviction, knowing how evil the government’s behavior was in how they handled the time between his detainment and his trial.
5) “indefinite detention for lack of conclusive evidence isn’t legal under normal circumstances and there should be no exemptions.” Totally agree. There need to be precedents and standards and rules to ensure that detention is never indefinite. The main reason Guantanamo is the mess that it is is that the everyone was totally winging it, using lack of legal precedent to go way overboard. But releasing (extraditing) a suspect because of insufficient evidence to justify detainment is a lot safer than bringing them to a city in the US for a criminal trial, and it’s the latter that I’m labeling as more complex than most progressives give it credit for.
6) That’s a simplistic view of torture, but of course so is Bush’s. Information provided through torture can work just fine if it’s verifiable, like “if you look in this person’s house you’ll find the evidence” or “if you talk to this person he’ll tell you what you need to know”. It can generate good leads. It’s unverifiable stuff like “I was the one who ordered it” or “I set the bomb” that are simply untrustworthy. Should the former kind of evidence also be tossed out as inadmissible, even if it’s provably true and protects our country? I say yes, because I want to undermine the credibility of methods of torture, and force investigators to find other ways of obtaining it, but it’s an extremely ambiguous legal area, and saying “torture doesn’t work” as a blanket statement is wrong.
7) I know I give Obama a lot of slack, but I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. I remember seeing some poll over the summer about closing Guantanamo, back when Cheney and Obama did their dueling speeches. Only 13% of those polled said they would be “very upset” if Guantanamo weren’t closed. Two thirds of Americans oppose KSM‘s criminal trial. This stuff disgusts me too, and I’m part of that 13%. Don’t mistake me for otherwise. But the constant threat of a public backlash also means that the slightest misstep in dealing with dangerous suspects could mean Guantanamo doesn’t get closed at all. It is because I so badly want it closed that I am fine with caution.
The Glenn Greenwald piece you linked to reflects exactly how I felt on January 22, 2009 as well, well before I or many others had really faced what it meant to close Guantanamo. I’ll be “very upset” if it doesn’t get closed, but I’m not going to shut my eyes to the very real reasons that it won’t meet the deadline, and lash out at Obama for cowardice or whatever. Conservatives are supposed to be the ones who oversimplify complex problems to satisfy their gut-level convictions about right and wrong, remember? We have to keep our heads.
Eric
Nov 17, 11:21am
mill-industries.com
When I have to number my paragraphs I’m not going to be as coherent as I’d like.
1) Politico just rubs me the wrong way with the pervasive politics-as-horserace prism. I’ve heard their print paper is a very different beast, editorially, than the clickable articles they push online. If newspapers were The Force, Politico would be Palpatine.
2) We should be using two different standards/methods to prosecute accused terrorists and to try to prevent future terrorism. We’ve imprisoned afgans and iraquis on the say so of neighbors who all they had to say was “he’s a terrorist.” That’s not prosecutable and it should even be grounds for indefinite detention but, yeah, it should absolutely be used by anti-terrorism agents for investigative/monitoring purposes.
4) I guess I’m just a strict constructionalist when it comes to the rule of law but, we can’t have our cake and eat it to. A sham trial based on torture produced confessions and an emotionally based conviction would be worse that acquitting to me. I don’t think that what i’ll be or what it’ll come to. In terms of KSM, I don’t see an outcome in which he won’t end up in a supermax.
5) “But releasing (extraditing) a suspect because of insufficient evidence to justify detainment is a lot safer than bringing them to a city in the US for a criminal trial, and it’s the latter that I’m labeling as more complex than most progressives give it credit for.” yes i agree. quietly bumping people back to their home countries would be the ‘easy’ decision. in terms of force of will, yeah a trial is the more complex and braver thing to do, politically.
6) i’m not sure i want to have a nuanced view of torture. lie detectors can get people to tell you things that you verify other ways but no one can be forced to undergo a polygraph and they’re (generally) not admissible in court. just because a battering ram and a hammer will both get a nail into a wall doesn’t mean i’d support using a battering ram.
7) I give Obama a lot of slack too. He was surrounded by uphill battles from the word ‘go’. Gitmo isn’t being decided vox populi. Thankfully so, otherwise we’d never make any headway. The civil war and the civil rights amendment show that the government can make tougher more progressive decisions that more directly impact the common person without any input from them on the matter.
Yeah that link was out of date. My internet-fu was weak. I’m not at all upset that the closing of Guantanamo won’t meet an arbitrary self-imposed deadline. I’m upset if we compromised our justice system to do so. If conservatives are characterized as make instant gut-level decisions than liberals are characterized as sticking their thumbs up their asses and making minute decisions by committee. Extremists, left and right, oversimplify to satisfy gut-level convictions. What I’m saying is the political decision to try or release to extradition isn’t going to somehow get easier in the future; there’s no ‘wait and see’ component to gitmo.
Better links:
Greenwald
Slate
Andrew Sullivan
Josh Marshall
[meta: 5 lines isn’t a very large comment box and your comment engine hates apostrophes]
spavis
Nov 17, 4:28pm
google.com
1) I know exactly what you mean. On Capitol Hill, where I lived for my first few months here, my commute to work passed by a free Politico newspaper box. I vividly remember walking by Union Station and reading that Arlen Specter was reneging on his promise to unions on card check, and that EFCA was effectively dead. I was furious, and Politico’s story was all mechanics, nothing to do with issues, and for whatever reason that only made me more angry. Like they didn’t care about anything except the levers of power. And so I swore off Politico—for a few days. I guess I’ve made my peace with it, and I go elsewhere for comfort.
4) Well, I doubt the torture-produced confessions will be part of the trial; it’d contradict everything Holder stands for, at this point. I don’t know enough about the KSM case to say for sure, but I doubt Holder would do this unless he had enough evidence aside from weak confessions.
6) Oh, my view of the ethics of torture is not at all nuanced. Like I said, I want any and all information gained from torture, even the verifiable kind, to be inadmissible in court. But I don’t think the effective counter to Cheney et al can just be “Torture doesn’t work”, because I expect that in enough cases, sadly, it does. But we don’t need that argument anyway—the moral argument, the damage to our reputation, and all the extra terrorists our policy of torture helped recruit, are counter enough.
“there’s no ‘wait and see’ component to gitmo” – Yeah, I think that’s right, and I can see why my closing sentence might have come off as saying “everything’s gonna be all right”, but all I really mean by it is that recent developments are heartening. And they are.
[And yeah, I think I’ll heighten the comment box. The apostrophe thing burnt me too, but it only happens when you copy/paste in fancy “MS Word” apostrophes…which are unfortunately what my comment processor does. I’ll have to fix that.]
Eric
Nov 18, 10:08pm
mill-industries.com
a depressing turn towards seat-of-their-pants prosecution. whither habeas corpus.
spavis
Nov 19, 1:03pm
google.com