Your name has been a constant for me over the years now for providing accurate and important information re Bush GWOT and the prisoners at Guantánamo. Your coverage, for instance, on the al-Marri decision is head and shoulders over anything else I could find.

Here’s Valtin’s site:
http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/

Andy: I cannot thank you enough. This is a truly superb piece, which pulls together so many angles and insights (such as the isolation and coerced evidence), which go beyond the decision. And it’s beautifully written.

Bingo. I would go still further: to the extent that the United States Supreme Court decided to duck the question of the outrageous executive fiat detention of Padilla in 2004 (and that with the allegedly more reasonable O’Connor and Rehnquist then in place instead of the automaton Roberts and the weasel Alito). The High Court decided that the burning question raised by Padilla was a venue issue. That moment, the United States, was de facto a dictatorship at that very moment, and I said as much. Jonathan Hafetz more or less confirmed this when I interviewed him, confirming that all “live” Padilla issues applied to Mr. al-Marri.

Of course, a little remembered detail of Mr. Padilla’s original case was that the district court judge, now Attorney General of the United States Michael Mukasey, ostensibly recognized Padilla’s right to counsel but implicitly recognized the heretofore-not-recognized-in-American-jurisprudence “executive bypass of the Constution;” Mukasey was then duly reversed by New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals (holding “charge or release”… no exceptions), duly eviscerated over… venue.

And yet while another federal appeals court noted in Parhat that the government does not get to make up the facts and law just because “it says it thrice”… what are we to make of the Supreme Court trio of Rasul, Hamdan and Boumediene resulting in, well, nothing: hundreds remain at GTMO, thousands more in Afghanistan, Iraq, and God knows where, with the precedent of arbitrary detention of citizens (Padilla) and lawful residents (al-Marri) alive and well, especially in the 4th Circuit, home of the naval brig where the government is most likely to consign anyone it wants.

It seems 9-11 really, really changed everything, while we Americans just sat here and let it. I hope I live long enough for the folly this has been to be recognized, and institutional reforms put in place to be sure that it is all reversed, and never repeated, and those responsible for this willy-nilly needless sacrifice of Constitutional principles duly brought to justice.

Amazing that the Magna Carta is being nullified in a land that resisted such measures from its former colonial boss. But much like all civilian liberties that were suspended in Germany in the nineteen thirties.

Many thanks for your sterling work, and for keeping us all informed on the progress of the doomsday clock. From your all-too-vivid description of the events leading to the indefinite incarceration of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, it looks to me as if the USA has not moved on since the Salem Witch Trials.

First, someone (KSM) is denounced as a witch. Then he is routinely tortured, until he gives the torturers some names. Then, the process is repeated for each of those names. At least there is good job security for the torturers — I can see no reason why or how this process should ever come to an end.

Nor can I see any reason why those people’s membership of the human race should not be rescinded by the rest of us — those who still have consciences (if only residual ones).

Best wishes
Tom Welsh
Basingstoke, England