LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.  
December 6, 2009
Log in / Register

 Choose a size
Text Size

Most Read

Troy Jollimore on Karen Armstrong’s 'The Case for God'

The Ratio

How the Anti-Semites of Hezbollah Have Sent Anne Frank Back Into Hiding

Why Obama's Strategy Won't Succeed

War and Peace

Most Comments
Most Emailed

Reports
Obama on His Own

Ear to the Ground

A/V Booth

Arts & Culture

Digs
Financial Meltdown 101
Vetting Sarah Palin

Truthdig Bazaar
Factory Girls

Factory Girls

By Leslie T. Chang
$17.16

The Impeachment of George W. Bush

The Impeachment of George W. Bush

By Elizabeth Holtzman and Cynthia L. Cooper
$10.17

more items

 
Ear to the Ground

Guantanamo’s Last Terror Trial

Email this item Email    Print this item Print   
Posted on Feb 6, 2009
AP photo / Brennan Linsley

Some 245 terror suspects are still being held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The legacy of terror trials at Guantanamo Bay has potentially come to an end, as a judge has dropped the charges for the last case at the naval base in accord with President Obama’s executive order to halt all court proceedings there.

The Guardian:

The last terror trial at Guantánamo Bay had been halted after the senior military judge dropped charges against a suspect in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, the Pentagon has said.

The military charges against suspected al-Qaida bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri marked the last active war crimes case at the US Navy base in Cuba.

The decision by Susan Crawford, the top legal authority for military trials at Guantánamo, brings all cases into compliance with Barack Obama’s executive order to halt terror court proceedings at the base.

A Pentagon spokesman said Crawford dismissed the charges against al-Nashiri without prejudice. That means new charges can be brought again later. He will remain in prison for the time being.

Read more

More Below the Ad

Advertisement


Elsewhere: .

Comments

Are you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig.

By diamond, February 9 at 3:24 am #

Give it back to Cuba indeed.Here are some interesting facts I found on Guantanamo in an excellent book called ‘Guantanamo: What the World should Know’.

1. Cuba’s constitution adopted in 1901, included what is called the Platt Amendment, legislation which established conditions for American intervention in Cuba and gave the United States the right to maintain a military base on the island in perpetuity.

2. Persuant to the Platt Amendment America leased Guantanamo from Cuba. The lease contains several critical provisions relevant to whether US courts have jurisdiction over the base.

3. The lease gives the US ‘complete jurisdiction and control’ of this territory. In other words, the Cubans have no authority whatsoever over Guantanamo.

4. The lease can only be terminated on the mutual consent of both parties. Cuba has wanted to terminate the lease since 1959 but the US has refused to consent.

5. The lease provides for a rent, $2,000 in gold the equivalent of $4,085 a year in US dollars. Although the Cuban government has refused to accept any lease money since 1959, the US is technically in default, and has been for many years because the lease provides that the base is only to be used as a coaling station.

6. The US claims it does not have sovereignty over the Guantanamo base, but in fact it exercises all aspects of sovereignty. For all intents and purposes, Guantanamo is a colony or a territory of the United States.

7. A soldier who commits a crime at Guantanamo can be tried by a court martial in Guantanamo or can be brought to the United States and tried in a federal district court. The applicable law in Guantanamo is the federal US law.

8. Guantanamo is, according to Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a ‘21st century Pentagon experiment that was, in fact, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions of 1949. It is similar in purpose to the German World War II operations that led to the ban: it is an interrogation camp, and interrogation camps ARE COMPLETELY AND FLATLY ILLEGAL’.

9.Further: ‘The detainees have no means of asserting their innocence and no means of testing their detentions in any court’.

10. ‘Guantanamo’s purpose is to break down the human personalities of the detainees in order to coerce from them whatever their captors want, to get them to confess to anything, to implicate anyone’. Again, this is according to Michael Ratner who has represented some of the detainees at Guantanamo.

I don’t think giving it back to Cuba will really solve the problem of how this place came to be what it is.

Report this

By PatrickHenry, February 7 at 8:31 pm #

Lets land the SeeBees and salvage what we can and bulldoze the rest.  Plant somes trees and grass and paint the port facilities.

Give it back to Cuba.

Report this

By Outraged, February 7 at 2:37 am #

Article quote: “But a third military judge, James Pohl, defied Obama’s order by scheduling a n arraignment for al-Nashiri at Guantánamo. That left the decision whether to continue to Crawford, whose delay on announcing what she would do prompted widespread concern at the Pentagon that she would refuse to follow orders and allow the court process to continue.

Last year, al-Nashiri said during a Guantánamo hearing that he confessed to helping plot the Cole bombing only because he was tortured by US interrogators. The CIA has admitted he was among terror suspects subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning, in 2002 and 2003 while being interrogated in secret CIA prisons.”

But there’s more,

“Bad enough that we learned last week that he had made an exception for “facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

This week we learned that Obama’s Administration has reaffirmed one of Bush’s egregious positions on rendition.

The case involves Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, who had been a victim of extraordinary rendition and who claims he was tortured by guards in Morocco using a razor blade repeatedly on his penis.”

http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx020509.html

O-k-a-y….. what’s wrong with this picture.

Report this

Add Your Comment

Posts by unregistered readers are moderated. Posts by members
are published immediately. Why wait? Register today!







Number of characters remaining: 4000

Notify you when others comment on this article?


Are you a human?
Retype the word you see here.


Please read and abide by our comment policy.
By submitting this comment, you agree to this site's terms and conditions.

 
 

 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.