About the Author
The Author
Andrew Heyman lives and works in Seattle Washington USA. His true vocation is political writing and agitating for the radical idea that a society that is governed by, and serves the needs of the people is best.
Andrew is also the member of a wonderful family with his loving wife, Pam, and the proud father of 2 wonderful children, Josie and Adam. They all keep him from becoming immersed in blogging to an unhealthy degree, and remind him of why he cares about what is going on in this world in the first place.
You can email him at kiacyclic-AT-gmail.com.
Justice GITMO style: "We have to have convictions."
The Washington Post has a bit of a bombshell:
The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.
Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.
. . .
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.' "
Nice.
But wait, how could we look at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray without it staring at the horror of our brutality in the face?
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."
Unfortunately the top story tomorrow will still be about a Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his ability to be paraded as the focus of The Hate. And so more crimes of state will go ignored, as we all fiddle while the remnants of the republic burn.