Big Apple GITMO Torture
By John Batchelor on November 14, 2009 at 7:00 PM in Current Affairs
Also, in a court, KSM is presumed innocent,and he has already confessed several times to his conduct without representation: Will this confession to a military tribunal authority remain in place, will KSM change his plea, will KSM be permitted to confess presumptively without counsel in the Federal system?
Then there is the torture debate.
POTUS and Attorney General Eric Holder have both on several occasions remarked that KSM was “tortured,” when he was subject to the so-called enhanced interrogations at GITMO.
I will wait on the full thinking of the massively shrewd lawyer pool in the nation, but as an amateur reader of US history, I am confounded to think of a model for trying in a Federal court a prisoner who has been tortured to confess his crimes. It sounds like lynching. It is lynching, until someone shows me how it is acceptable to torture a man to confess and then to sentence him to death upon his confession?
John Boehner asserts that the White House was “reverting to a dangerous pre-9/11 mentality.” The major blast comes from Joe Liebermann, who uses WMD rhetoric: “It is inconceivable that we would bring these alleged terrorists back to New York for trial, to the scene of the carnage they created eight years ago, and give them a platform to mock the suffering of their victims and the victims’ families, and rally their followers to continue waging jihad against America.”
Lieberman’s point will be a rallying cry for his colleagues John McCain and Lindsey Graham. It is a fair guess that all New York lawmakers in Washington and Albany will contribute to the hissing and shrieking.
Why does the Obama administration want to pick this fight? Is it because there is no one of weight in the White House from New York City? Can POTUS and his political advisers, chiefly Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, be ignorant of New York and its pols? The 9/11 families live here and exercise overwhelming political moxie.
The trial will make NYC the center of the known universe for legal, moral, political, spiritual and historical firefights? Everyone can imagine the security problem. Foley Square (right) as target uno for the world’s do-I-feel-lucky jihadist cell. Then there are the sicko Hasans of the planet, some of have been known to visit New York.
Eric Holder asserts that he is confident that the prosecution will be successful in obtaining a guilty verdict and the death penalty. But this is a Federal courtroom. Anything can happen, including especially treating the accused as not guilty and then risking a failure to convict.
Perhaps KSM will do us a favor and interpret his life as martydom, insisting he is guilt, shunning lawyers, and asking to be executed. I cannot now answer (because I am an amateur historian) if a court is permitted to permit a defendant to insist upon guilt and execution without examining how the evidence provided by the prosecution was obtained. That would be the torture defense.
Ed Hayes has told me repeatedly that he does nto see how you can get a conviction in Federal court based upon torture or even with torture as part of the process of detention since 2002. I am eager to learn how the prosecutors maneuver through an obstacle course that is immediately crowded with three centuries of jurisprudence about the accused and with every civil libertarian alive and dead.
Then there is the death penalty part. How can Uncle Sam execute a man who POTUS has declared a victim of torture by Uncle Sam? This alone will be law school debate for the next several centuries.
Look at how the 1865 Federal court treated the Lincoln conspirators. Who does not squirm at reading the abuse of the prisoners — the hanging of Mary Surratt?
Also, closing GITMO is a partisan political chip for the Obama administration. What of the detainees at Bagram airbase outside of Kabul, which the Obama administration has been using as a catch-all. It is filling up with terror suspects, many of whom we do not know nor will likely ever learn of.
What is to be done with the New GITMO? Leave it to the next Attorney General? Is that what Greg Craig said before he was fired? We will get the story, but for now it looks that the Obama team over promised and now under delivers — and Greg Craig was the fall guy.
………..
From the blog for my syndicated radio show.
On Sundays at 11:00 ET: Larry Johnson joins the “experts panel” weekly on my West Coast syndicated radio show. Listen via KFI-AM.
by Ronald Scott
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