US Taxpayers Dollars at Work

The idiocy of the Bush administration's treatment of Guantanamo prisoners now continues under Obama. Here's a posting by LizardBreath, a New York lawyer, on the Unfogged web site:

This Is Shameful

US District Judge Colleen Kottar-Kelly just ordered the release (don't get excited, it's not going to happen unless the Justice Department decides not to appeal) of Fouad al-Rubiah, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Read the opinion -- there are a lot of redactions, so you can't get the details, but we took a middleaged aircraft engineer who flew to Afghanistan for charitable purposes a short while before 9/11, cobbled together some insane story out of interrogations from unreliable informants, and tortured him into confessing to it. If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions, we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn't make any sense. And now we've asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

Particularly grotesque was this quote from al-Rubiah, explaining one of the arguments interrogators used to convince him to confess:

In about August 2004, shortly before my CSRT hearing [an administrative review of Al Rabiah's detention], my interrogators told me the CSRT was just a show that would allow the United States to 'save face.' My interrogators told me no one leaves Guantanamo innocent, and told me I would be sent home to Kuwait if I 'admitted' some of the false things I had said in my interrogations. The interrogators also told me that I would never go home if I denied these things, because the United States government would never admit I had been wrongly held.
In case anyone was wondering, the hearing that Judge Kottar-Kelly is referring to in the opinion, in which the Justice Department took those irresponsible and indefensible positions, took place in August '09. On Obama's watch. This has to change somehow.

Afterthought: Remember, the fact that this case made it to a habeas hearing means that it's one of the US Government's strongest cases -- they've let some people go, and are dragging their feet even harder on other cases. This evidentiary pile of garbage was pretty close to the best we've got against any of the detainees. Who've been imprisoned and tortured for better than seven years now.

Think about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on these farcical "judicial" cases. This makes the French treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus look like kid gloves. The joke is that the US government is running huge deficits, but they think this political "show trials" are worth the money. Nonsense.

I have no special insight into the case, but I'm with LizardBreath. I suspect this guy is innocent and the victim of a system that can't admit its errors. Even with the "change you can believe in" Obama administration, nothing has changed.

Here's the Wikipedia page on Fouad Mahoud Hasan Al Rabia. Notice that LizardBreath's spelling is different: Fouad al-Rubiah. Notice that the actual US District Court's spelling is different: Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah. This gives you an appreciation why those "no fly lists" are close to useless. These guys don't have "definitive" names.

The US's thrashing about on the Guantanamo issue reminds me of the Canadian government's thrashing about on its "commitment" in Afghanistan. A previous government backed us into a "commitment" and the current government knows it is very unpopular with the population but has to keep one steely eye on the Americans because pulling out too "precipitously" would anger the Americans. So idiot government flails about and talks about "commitment" and "staying the course" and "duty" and other cut-to-fit concepts.