The four sections are connected, as cheerleaders for the mandatory military detention of terror suspects want them to be sent to Guantánamo, and have done, if I recall correctly, at least since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas plane bomber in 2009, was arrested, read his Miranda rights, and interrogated by the FBI. Recently, Abdulmutallab, who told his interrogators all they wanted to know without being held in military custody — and, for that matter, without being tortured, which is what the hardcore cheerleaders for military detention also want — was tried and convicted in a federal court.

Hundreds of other terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court, throughout the Bush years, and under Obama, but supporters of military custody like to forget this, as it conflicts with their notions, held since the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s horrendous flight from the law, that terrorists are warriors. Underpinning it all is the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the founding document of the “war on terror,” passed the week after the 9/11 attacks. This authorizes the President to pursue anyone, anywhere who he thinks was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and it is a dreadfully open-ended excuse for endless war whose repeal I have long encouraged, but which some lawmakers have been itching to renew, even after the death of Osama bin Laden, and the obvious incentives for the winding-down of the ruinous, decade-long “war on terror.”

The fundamental opposition to the provision for the mandatory military custody of terror suspects

Depressingly, when it came to passing the Act, the world was treated to the unedifying spectacle of lawmakers arguing about whether the existing law — the AUMF, plus the Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that it authorizes detention until the end of hostilities — actually applies to Americans, and whether, on that basis, this new legislation does too. Their compromise was that it would authorize whatever already exists, which only made them look rather stupid, frankly. For evidence, check out this comment from Sen. Carl Levin,  as mentioned in the New York Times. “We make clear that whatever the law is, it is unaffected by this language in our bill,” he said.

However, one of the even more extraordinary things about the Senate’s custody provisions is not only that they are a mangled, scrambled mess, but also that no one who will be required to obey them wants anything to do with them. The executive branch, the military, the FBI and the CIA — no one asked for this new policy. As Spencer Ackerman noted for Wired:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists.

Also opposing the bill’s unwanted provisions are Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, Obama Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, 16 former interrogators and counterterrorism professionals, and 26 retired military leaders who, on Tuesday, urged Senators to support an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall, backed by Sen. Jim Webb, to strip all the troublesome provisions from the legislation (and also see Sen, Udall’s eminently sensible Washington Post op-ed). Despite this, the Udall amendment was defeated by 61 votes to 37 (with 16 Democrats voting against the amendment — see the breakdown of votes here).

In addition, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, although whether he will remains to be seen. The mandatory military custody provisions, after all, have a get-out clause, as Andrew Cohen noted for the Atlantic a month ago, when he wrote:

Section 1032, to be applied in concert with Section 1031, contains a mandatory detention requirement for anyone “determined” (by the military) to be a member of al-Qaeda or its affiliates. It allows the executive branch, however, to “waive” this requirement by having the “Secretary of Defense … in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence” submit to Congress a written certificate that the waiver is in the “national security interests of the United States.” The executive branch, in other words, would practically have to do a song-and-dance on Capitol Hill to prosecute a terror suspect in civilian court.

Obama, of course, is no great defender of due process, as he had Osama bin Laden killed in a Wild West style and also approved the execution without any kind of charge or trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in Yemen, where he was producing irritating jihadist material in English on the Internet. However, it seems likely that his defense secretary, Leon Panetta, will indeed be forced to jump through hoops if the custody provisions are not removed.

I honesty find it hard to believe that these proposals even made it as far as they did, especially as Sen. Carl Levin was involved in drafting the legislation with the usual deranged suspects — Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Liebermann — plus torture advocate Sen. Kelly Ayote, who attempted to specifically reintroduce torture as official US policy in her own deranged bill, which was recently defeated. Astonishingly, the Senate Armed Services Committee, where this toxic brew was created, conjured it up in secret, which did not go down well with some of the lawmakers’ colleagues. Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid initially found his spine and spoke up against it, he soon remembered that it is his job to cave in on matters of importance, which he duly did, although others were not so easily swayed.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as Andrew Rosenthal explained in the New York Times, noted with horror that the provisions were “hashed out behind closed doors without consultation with his committee [he is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee], or the Intelligence Committee, or the Defense Department, the FBI or the intelligence community.” In addition, as Andrew Cohen explained:

Leahy, and California’s Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote Sen. Reid a letter requesting that the controversial provisions be removed from the NDAA. “We concur with the Administration’s view that mandatory military custody is ‘undue and dangerous,’” they wrote, “and that these provisions would ‘severely and recklessly undermine’ our Nation’s counterterrorism efforts.”

The provisions relating to Guantánamo and why they are also important

However, while a host of critics are lined up against the mandatory military custody aspects of the bill, far less attention, unfortunately, has been paid to the provisions preventing the closure of Guantánamo. As Andrew Cohen lamented a month ago, “I think Section 1034 [banning the use of any funds to buy an alternative prison] may be the worst of the lot — a triumph of fear and prejudice over pragmatic solutions. But it doesn’t appear to have raised the hackles of even those senators who are opposed to some of the other provisions. Go figure.”

Go figure, indeed. It may, perhaps, be slightly cynical of me to note that the story of Guantánamo involves foreigners and that Americans only wake up in any kind of numbers when legal monstrosities might apply to American citizens, but there does appear to be some truth in it. If it could be demonstrated that no American could possibly end up in mandatory military custody as a result of the Senate’s mad provisions, I would be prepared to wager that hardly any Americans would bat an eyelid.

As it is, I can only hope that the two sections relating to Guantánamo, and two other sections specifically criticized by the President’s advisors (in which Congress demanded detainee reviews from the executive branch) are subjected to a veto. To make it clear, Section 1033 (which ramps up unjustifiable restrictions already implemented by lawmakers) is entitled, “Requirements for certifications relating to the transfer of detainees at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign countries and other foreign entities,” and it stipulates that no transfer out of Guantánamo will be allowed “if there is a confirmed case of any individual who was detained at [Guantánamo] who was transferred to such foreign country or entity and subsequently engaged in any terrorist activity.”

As noted above, Section 1034 (which repeats previous bans imposed by lawmakers) is entitled, “Prohibition on use of funds to construct or modify facilities in the United States to house detainees transferred from United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” prevents the closure of Guantánamo by stopping the President from buying or modifying an alternative facility elsewhere, and then there are the two other provisions, both new, and both largely unnoticed.

Section 1035, entitled, “Procedures for periodic detention review of individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” requires the Secretary of Defense “to submit a report to Congress for implementing the periodic review process” established in the executive order of March this year, which, outrageously, authorized the indefinite detention without charge or trial — but with periodic reviews — of 46 of the remaining 171 prisoners, on the unacceptable basis that they were too dangerous to be released, but that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial.

Section 1036, entitled, “Procedures for Status Determinations,” states that, “Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report setting forth the procedures for determining the status of persons detained pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40) for purposes of section 1031″ — meaning that it is supposed to establish, to the satisfaction of Congress, who will be subjected to mandatory military custody.

The response of the President’s Office, in its letter threatening a veto, spells out the administration’s opposition to these sections, and is of interest. The President’s advisors noted:

The certification and waiver, required by section 1033 before a detainee may be transferred from Guantánamo Bay to a foreign country, continue to hinder the Executive branch’s ability to exercise its military, national security, and foreign relations activities. While these provisions may be intended to be somewhat less restrictive than the analogous provisions in current law, they continue to pose unnecessary obstacles, effectively blocking transfers that would advance our national security interests, and would, in certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The Executive branch must have the flexibility to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers.

Section 1034′s ban on the use of funds to construct or modify a detention facility in the United States is an unwise intrusion on the military’s ability to transfer its detainees as operational needs dictate.

Section 1035 conflicts with the consensus-based interagency approach to detainee reviews required under Executive Order No. 13567, which establishes procedures to ensure that periodic review decisions are informed by the most comprehensive information and the considered views of all relevant agencies.

Section 1036, in addition to imposing onerous requirements, conflicts with procedures for detainee reviews in the field that have been developed based on many years of experience by military officers and the Department of Defense.

The President’s advisors concluded:

In short, the matters addressed in these provisions are already well regulated by existing procedures and have traditionally been left to the discretion of the Executive branch.

Broadly speaking, the detention provisions in this bill micromanage the work of our experienced counterterrorism professionals, including our military commanders, intelligence professionals, seasoned counterterrorism prosecutors, or other operatives in the field. These professionals have successfully led a Government-wide effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents over two consecutive Administrations. The Administration believes strongly that it would be a mistake for Congress to overrule or limit the tactical flexibility of our Nation’s counterterrorism professionals.

This is not quite the end of the road for the NDAA, as it must now be consolidated with the version previously passed by the House of Representatives, which I wrote about here and here. However, it is almost certain that the President will soon be required to make clear what he thinks.

If Obama is wavering, as is his habit, I would suggest that he takes note of the fact that the election season is nearly upon us, and that, as we approach that frenzy of hype and hyperbole, he needs do something to make his progressive supporters remember why they might want to vote for him, rather than just hoping — or presuming — that they will not vote against him. In short, the President needs to veto this bill, and stand up for US justice, and the still-pressing need to close Guantánamo, rather than doing as he has so often on national security issues, and caving in to pressure.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Fine words, indeed, although the Times itself has, over the last ten years, in common with most, if not all of the American establishment, failed to thoroughly and repeatedly condemn efforts, first by George W. Bush, and then by the Obama administration, to hold military trials for the mixed bag of soldiers and terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo.

This is where the rot set in, for which everyone in a position of authority, whether in politics or the media, bears responsibility. However, the failure to stem the poison flowing from this wound to the established order — in which terrorists are criminals, and soldiers are not terrorists — has led to an outrageous situation in which lawmakers (both Republicans and Democrats) have decided that the aberrations introduced by the Bush administration, which should, by now, have been thoroughly discredited, were, instead, just the first steps in the creation of an all-encompassing military state.

In this dystopian future, coming to America within months, if lawmakers are successful, anyone regarded as a terrorist must be held in military detention, where, it is planned, they may be subjected to abuse with impunity, and, if required, held forever without a trial and without any rights.

This was the aberration initially dreamt up by Bush and his close advisors for their “War on Terror,” and implemented at Guantánamo, throughout the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, and around the world in a network of secret prisons, but although it should have died as an enduring concept when President Obama took office, it took less than a year for supporters of military detention for terror suspects to start proposing its continuation and expansion, suggesting that no foreign terror suspect should ever receive a federal court trial.

None of the cheerleaders for military detention cared that, throughout the eight years of the Bush administration, the detention program in the “War on Terror” was actually a failure as well as an aberration, which had struggled to try just three men, because the correct venue for terrorist trials was in federal court, where hundreds of successful trials took place.

Instead, when, in November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a federal court trial in New York for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the cheerleaders for military detention began mobilizing against the trial, starting a successful backlash that encouraged the administration first to freeze the proposal, and then, this year, to officially abandon it in favor of a military trial at Guantánamo.

This was a disgrace — and Eric Holder knew it, if no one else — but what no one in the administration foresaw was how Obama’s steady capitulation to pressure would embolden his critics to make ever more outrageous demands. Six weeks after the 9/11 trial announcement, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, was apprehended in Detroit after trying — and failing — to blow up a plane with a bomb in his underwear, the cries went up for him to be sent to Guantánamo and subjected to waterboarding, not read his Miranda rights, interrogated non-coercively by FBI agents, and tried in a federal court.

The critics did not have their way, although they did persuade the ever-compliant President to abandon releasing any more cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, issuing a temporary moratorium that is still in place a year and a half later. This has contributed enormously to the stalemate at Guantánamo — where 171 men remain, even though 89 have been approved for transfer — and has created ill-feeling in Yemen, where the President has, effectively, judged all Yemenis as potential terrorists.

Even more crucially, the empowerment of Obama’s critics led inexorably to further attempts to dictate policy. There had been attacks on the President’s power before, through legislation preventing any prisoner from being brought to the US mainland for any reason except to face a trial, and through moves to prevent the President from closing Guantánamo by buying a prison in Illinois and moving the prisoners there. However, in December last year lawmakers went further than before.

In passages inserted into the annual defense authorization bill, lawmakers banned the use of funds to bring any Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland — even to face trials — and specifically mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by name. They also banned the use of funds to buy a prison on the US mainland for the Guantánamo prisoners, and prevented the President from releasing any prisoner unless the defense secretary signed off on the safety of doing so. This provision was designed specifically to prevent the release of any prisoner cleared by the President ‘s own interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force to countries regarded by lawmakers as dangerous, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

These passages were an unwarranted and unconstitutional assault on the President’s powers, as even Conservative commentators recognized, but Obama again failed to challenge his critics. This reinforced them to such an extent that, in May, when dealing with this year’s defense authorisation bill, lawmakers in the House of Representatives responded to the news of the assassination of Osama bin Laden not by declaring an end to the “War on Terror,” but by insisting that the basis for that war — the Congress-approved Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks — should be renewed and made even more sweeping.

They also renewed their attacks on the President’s ability to transfer prisoners to the US mainland to face trials, his right to release prisoners to other countries without jumping through hoops, and his right to review prisoners’ ongoing detention without Congressional interference, according to his March 7, 2011 Executive Order authorizing the indefinite detention without charge or trial of 47 of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners. That order had already enraged those on the other end of the political spectrum, who recognized that it was Obama’s official extension of the heart of Bush’s own discredited detention policies.

Also included in the attacks was, for the first time, a fundamental assault on the President’s right to prosecute foreigners seized in connection with terrorist offences in federal court, also without interference from Congress.

The problems with the defense authorisation bill first came to light at the end of May, when the President’s advisors finally responded to “provisions that challenge critical Executive branch authority” by stating that, “If the final bill presented to the President includes these provisions … the President’s senior advisors would recommend a veto.”

That was important, but although the endless expansion of the “War on Terror” was dropped as an aim, as a result of concerted pressure from opponents, the Senate Armed Services Committee was fundamentally undaunted, and last month unveiled its plans for the mandatory military detention of terrorist suspects. As the New York Times explained in its dissenting editorial:

Republicans and Democrats are championing bills to further militarize the prosecution of terrorists, beyond anything even President George W. Bush proposed. They want Americans to believe the legislation will keep the country safer. In fact, these bills could end up tying the hands of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials trying to disrupt terrorist plots. They are likely to deprive prosecutors of their most powerful weapons in bringing terrorists to justice. And they come perilously close to upending the prohibition, which dates back to Reconstruction, against the military’s operating as a police force within the United States.

The Times also noted, correctly, that there was “no sign” that the White House had “tried to stop” the House of Representatives from “passing a particularly awful version of these bills, which would move most, if not all, terrorism cases from civilian courts to military tribunals,” or had “tried to stop” the Senate Armed Services Committee “from approving only a slightly better one.” The editors also had no time for complaints by Democrats on the Committee, who include Sen. Carl Levin, that “they defeated far worse proposals,” and made it clear that “President Obama must push the Democratic leadership to amend the Senate bill — and make it clear that he will veto any bill that turns over proper law enforcement functions to the military.”

While this situation continues to fester, with only the threat of a veto standing in the way of a dangerously militarized state, another development — the uproar over the administration’s proposal to try an alleged Somali terrorist, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, in federal court in New York — has kept the advocates of military detention busy, even though the Warsame case actually raises a whole set of other troubling issues.

Before his arrival in New York to face a trial, Warsame had been held on a ship, in military custody, since April 19. As a result, the most troubling question ought to concern this two-month period off the books, whereas the military detention crowd has obsessed instead about how President Obama has been involved in what 23 Senators, led by John McCain and Mitch McConnell, described last week in a letter as an action that “appears to be a circumvention of the clear intent of many in Congress that terrorists captured abroad under the Authorization for Use of Military Force should not be brought into the United States for trial.”

Perhaps this will play into the hands of the Obama administration, in which federal court trials are seen as the correct venue for terrorist trials, even though Obama is himself responsible for having revived the military trials at Guantánamo in the first place, when he should have left them alone. This latest development — the letter from the 23 Senators — certainly doesn’t show lawmakers in a favourable light, as they continue, obsessively, to flog their pet topic.

If people are paying close attention, they may finally realize how deranged the advocates of military detention sound, although they should, of course, have been wary in the first place of the military being given powers that correctly belong to the law enforcement agencies, and especially of proposals that anyone accused of terrorist activities in the US must be held in military detention.

That way extreme danger lies — very possibly of the kind that led to the US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla losing his mind in a US military brig during his ordeal of solitary confinement and torture between 2002 and 2005 — and if that is understood, then the correct focus in the Warsame story might become clear. That is to ask, ten years after ships were used to hold prisoners seized after the invasion of Afghanistan, at the start of the so-called “War on Terror,” why a ship has now been used to hold, for several months, a prisoner seized in connection with another conflict — in Somalia — in which the United States is not even officially involved.

In addition, it is also worth asking why, two and a half years since the end of the Bush administration, we are hearing once again about how a prisoner held outside the law had his first interrogations sessions — conducted under unspecified circumstances — followed by non-coercive interrogations by FBI agents, which were designed to secure evidence for a federal court trial. As the Associated Press described it, Warsame “was interrogated at sea by intelligence officials,” and it was only later that the FBI stepped in and “began the interrogation from scratch, in a way that could be used in court.”

Under Bush, the follow-up interrogators, after the torture had taken place, were openly referred to as “clean teams” — as they were in February 2008 when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators, held for years in secret CIA torture prisons, were first put forward for military trials. If we are back in the dirty world of torture, that is even more chilling than the persistent attempts by lawmakers to establish a militarized state.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

To be fair, Cheney’s ad has backfired badly, drawing the ire not only of those on the left, but also of heavyweight conservatives, nineteen of whom signed a statement last week denouncing it, declaring, “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” and adding that the attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether that system is federal court trials or Military Commissions.

Those who signed the statement included former Solicitor General Ken Starr, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, former White House lawyer Brad Berenson, John Bellinger, the former legal adviser to the National Security Council and the State Department, and two former detainee policy officials in the Bush administration, Matthew Waxman, and Charles “Cully” Stimson, who, ironically, was himself forced to resign from the DoD in 2007 after starting a similar witch-hunt against corporate law firms whose lawyers represented prisoners at Guantánamo.

Interestingly, another former Bush official who signed the statement is Daniel Dell’Orto, the Acting General Counsel for the DoD after the resignation of William J. Haynes in 2008. Dell’Orto was close to those who established the Bush administration’s torture regime as the deputy to Haynes, who was one of Dick Cheney’s key “War Council” lawyers, along with David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Flanigan.

Further criticism came from the Conservative author and lawyer Paul Mirengoff, who “contrast[ed] what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” as the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein explained, following a call to Mirengoff, and from Peter D. Keisler, an Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration’s Justice Department, who told the New York Times that it was “wrong” to attack the lawyers, and that “There is a longstanding and very honorable tradition of lawyers representing unpopular or controversial clients.”

Moreover, in the Wall Street Journal on March 10, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote that Keep America Safe’s argument was “both shoddy and dangerous.” Mukasey pointed out that “a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors — perhaps rightly — revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil’s Island for little more than being Jewish.”

This is all very encouraging, of course, because the only people who can legitimately complain that lawyers who worked on behalf of prisoners at Guantánamo shouldn’t work for the Justice Department and are, essentially, traitors to their country, are those who believe that time should have stopped before the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask why they were being held.

The only reason that the Supreme Court made this decision was because prisoners in Guantánamo who stated that they had been seized by mistake had no way of challenging their detention. This was because the Bush administration had created a legal black hole at Guantánamo, holding men (and boys) neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, to be put forward for federal court trials on charges related to terrorism, but as “enemy combatants,” a novel category of human being with no rights whatsoever.

Those who worked on the prisoners’ cases may have been doing so for reasons that some Conservatives find distasteful, but the blunt truth is that those who took on Guantánamo cases were — and still are — working as part of a fully functioning civilized country that respects the rule of law, and those who regard such actions as a sign of fraternizing with the enemy are, if not just opportunistic leeches, playing the fear card, the kind of deluded people that America can do without, apologists for the dictatorial powers seized by President Bush that would have been anathema to the Founding Fathers.

Sadly, however, much of the damage wrought by Liz Cheney and her colleagues will never be undone. In a country where a large percentage of the population is permanently whipped up into a frenzy regarding the Obama administration’s response to terrorism by opportunistic broadcasters and lawmakers, who have seized on national security issues as a winning card in a relentlessly negative campaign, it’s probable that many of the Conservative voices criticizing Liz Cheney will have been ignored.

Even more worrying, however, is the fact that, despite this backlash in defense of America’s foundation as a country based on the rule of law, other Republican lawmakers continue to insist that they should be dictating the Obama administration’s policies, even though their proposals smack of the kind of hysterical overreaction that got us in this mess in the first place.

President Obama made a terrible mistake last May when he accepted calls to revive the Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, and also signaled his willingness to continue holding other men indefinitely without charge or trial. A government driven more by principles and less by pragmatism would have insisted, as Obama suggested on taking office, that the only acceptable ways of dealing with the prisoners was to put them forward for federal court trials, or to release them.

This failure has given succor to those who are desperate to come up with novel ways of dealing with terrorist suspects that would have been far more difficult to launch had the administration acted more decisively. When Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November that five men — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — would face federal court trials for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, he was following a course that reflected the best of America’s legal traditions, and, as he recently told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done. History will show that the decisions we’ve made are the right ones.”

Nevertheless, by also reviving the Military Commissions, the administration allowed itself to be ambushed by critics who stirred up opposition to the decision to hold federal court trials, which has led to a ludicrous situation in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, in some unholy alliance with Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel (who “walked out” the door whenever Guantánamo was mentioned, according to a source cited by Mayer) has been pushing Obama to reconsider the decision to try the men in federal courts.

Sen. Graham is not the only one pushing at Obama’s self-inflicted vulnerability on Guantánamo and related issues. Since the failed plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was apprehended on Christmas Day, countless critics have charged headfirst into the lawless space inhabited by Liz Cheney and Keep America Safe, arguing that Abdulmutallab should not have been interrogated by the FBI, read his rights, and charged in a federal court, and, in some cases, arguing that he should specifically have been waterboarded and sent to Guantánamo.

This, sadly, is no fringe activity reserved for lunatics, and just last week, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a bill, the “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010” (PDF), in which they proposed to ban civilian trials for those designated by the federal government as “unprivileged enemy belligerents.” The bill defines an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” as “an individual who (a) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; (b) has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or (c) was a part of al-Qaeda at the time of capture,” meaning that it could easily extend to anyone who allegedly supports hostilities against the US — including, it would seem, American citizens.

Moreover, the bill proposes stripping these “unprivileged enemy belligerents” of any of the legal rights usually afforded those accused of crimes in the United States, proposing that they should be taken into military custody for the purposes of interrogation and determination of their status, with the possibility that, after interrogation and determination of status, some might be designated as “high-level detainees.” In addition, the bill proposes holding these men “for the duration of hostilities,” and, if desired, putting them forward for trials by Military Commission.

In a ludicrously overblown press release, Sen. McCain ignored all the evidence that Abdulmutallab’s interrogation had provided useful information, stating that the primary reason for introducing the legislation was “to ensure that the mistakes made during the apprehension of the Christmas Day bomber, such as reading him a Miranda warning, will never happen again and put Americans’ security at risk.”

We are, I suppose, fortunate that Sen. McCain did not win the 2008 presidential election, as this bill so shockingly echoes almost every vile innovation that the Bush administration established in its “War on Terror.” However, it is depressing that, while Liz Cheney has provoked some Republicans to remember that America already has laws for dealing robustly and fairly with terrorist suspects as part of its criminal justice system, other Republicans are still intent on undermining history and America’s self-image by insisting that terrorists are warriors, ignoring the Military Commissions’ lamentable history of dealing with terrorist suspects, ignoring the federal courts’ successful history of dealing with those very cases, and, in the case of Senators McCain and Lieberman, apparently believing that resuscitating the darkest years of modern American history will serve any useful purpose at all.

Like Liz Cheney, McCain and Lieberman seem to have forgotten that dictators or those who support them, rather than elected officials who are obliged to uphold the US Constitution, are the only people who believe in holding people in arbitrary detention, neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, but as “enemy combatants” — or in 2010’s remake, “unprivileged enemy belligerents” — who can be held indefinitely, and interrogated in conditions that, when last tried out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, led inexorably to the torture that John McCain used to deplore.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

The theory, which became prominent in the Reagan administration, but has peppered US history, contends that, when he wishes, the president is entitled to act unilaterally, without interference from Congress or the judiciary. This is in direct contravention of the separation of powers on which the United States was founded, and critics have long contended that it is nothing less than an attempt by the executive to seize the dictatorial powers that the Constitution was designed to prevent.

Under the cover of the wartime powers granted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and with encouragement from lawyers including, in particular, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff (and former legal counsel) David Addington, President Bush has pursued the theory relentlessly, issuing a record number of “signing statements” to laws passed by Congress, designed to prevent the nation’s politicians from interfering in the executive’s quest for unchecked power.

He has also approved a number of secret memos, which, in conjunction with various “signing statements,” have authorized what numerous critics of the administration regard as war crimes. These include detaining prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” as “illegal enemy combatants” and holding them without charge or trial, dismissing the protections of the Geneva Conventions, redefining torture and approving its use by the US military and the CIA, and authorizing “extraordinary rendition” and the use of secret prisons.

As if to prove what he was saying, Bill Kovach’s speech to a meeting of international journalists in Washington D.C. went unreported in the US media (and I located it only on the website of a Jamaican newspaper). And yet in many ways Kovach could have gone further, and could also have asked why the presidential candidates themselves have been silent about the current administration’s crimes.

The answer, sadly, is that the executive’s thirst for unfettered executive power is not a priority for voters, even when it spills out of foreign wars and offshore prisons and onto the US mainland. Too many Americans, it seems, are unconcerned or unaware that the president can even hold US citizens and legal residents as “enemy combatants,” and can imprison them indefinitely on the US mainland without charge or trial, as the cases of Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri reveal in horrific detail.

As a result, gross abuses of power in the name of the “War on Terror,” and the dictatorial theory that underpins them, have been ignored on the campaign trail. This is disturbing for a number of reasons, not least because it has deprived the campaign of former constitutional law professor Barack Obama’s eloquent and principled defense of the laws that have been shredded or sidelined by the Bush administration.

Over the past two years, Senator Obama has repeatedly declared his support for habeas corpus, a cornerstone of American law, inherited from the English, which prohibits arbitrary imprisonment and grants all prisoners the right to know why they are being held. He robustly defended habeas corpus while resisting the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a poisonous piece of legislation, which not only stripped the Guantánamo prisoners of their habeas rights, but also reinforced the president’s right to seize and detain indefinitely anyone he regarded as an “illegal enemy combatant,” and attempted to grant immunity to the President and his minions for any actions that might one day be regarded as war crimes.

Senator Obama has also stated that he will “reject torture without exception,” and last August delivered a stirring speech in which, touching on all the administration’s law-shredding excesses, he declared, “As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists … The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.”

In June this year, when the Supreme Court (which had granted the Guantánamo prisoners statutory habeas corpus rights in June 2004) rejected the habeas-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act and its predecessor, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and ruled that the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights were constitutional, Senator Obama was swift to congratulate the justices, calling the ruling “an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

Since then, however, the Obama campaign has gone silent on executive power and the administration’s war crimes, and Senator Obama has only spoken out publicly on one occasion in September, in response to a ludicrous assertion by Sarah Palin, at the Republican conference, that “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

Senator Obama responded by telling supporters in Michigan that habeas corpus was “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” which “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’” He explained that it was an essential safeguard, “because we don’t always have the right person. We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.” His conclusion drove the argument back to where it should have been, but it has sadly not been repeated since: “Don’t mock the Constitution. Don’t make fun of it. Don’t suggest that it’s not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years.”

Another reason for disappointment is that, by refusing to raise these issues, Senator Obama has allowed John McCain to comfortably maintain the Republicans’ “traditional” role as protectors of national security, without having the basis of that assumption challenged, and has also failed to exploit Senator McCain’s shameful hypocrisy, as he has drifted to the right to appeal to the Republican base.

Even before the campaign became all-consuming, Senator McCain (an outspoken opponent of torture, as the result of his own experiences in Vietnam) had a spotty record on the abuse of executive power — and even on the prevention of torture by US forces. Although he attempted to introduce a ban on torture by all US personnel in the Detainee Treatment Act, he allowed himself to be bullied by Dick Cheney into excluding the CIA from the act’s provisions, and the following year he willingly endorsed the Military Commissions Act.

This year, however, Senator McCain’s flight from his own convictions has accelerated alarmingly. In February, he conveniently shelved his lifelong opposition to torture by voting against a bill banning the use of torture by the CIA, and after the Supreme Court’s habeas ruling in June, he declared that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” even though, in 2005, he had told NBC’s Meet the Press that the problem with Guantánamo was that the prisoners continued to be held without “any adjudication of their cases.”

However, the main reasons for being disappointed that the crimes of a rogue administration have barely been mentioned as the election approaches are these: firstly, that I can only wonder, in spite of Senator Obama’s fine words, whether the Democrats in general, who famously ruled impeachment “off the table” when they gained a political majority two years ago, would in fact be unwilling to cede power if it was theirs to wield; and secondly (and most significantly), because it allows those responsible for the long list of egregious crimes that have soiled America’s name to leave office unchallenged. Donald Rumsfeld may be long gone, and George W. Bush nothing more than a shadow, but in the Office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney and David Addington, the architects of this unprecedented assault on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the UN Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions have been allowed to maintain their homicidal delusions, nurtured through decades of support for executive overreach in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.

As law professor Scott Horton explained to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer for an in-depth analysis of Addington in 2006, the mission of the Vice President’s closest adviser “and a small group of administration lawyers who share his views” has been to “overturn two centuries of jurisprudence defining the limits of the executive branch. They’ve made war a matter of dictatorial power.”

In conclusion, then, I can only note that it’s a sad indictment of a country’s state of mind when the ruling administration has been devoted to dictatorial powers and war crimes, but an election campaign comes and goes as though it had never happened.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

A version of this article was published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Note: The photo of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque.

We also talked about the case of the Uyghurs, the wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo, who are currently engaged in a struggle to secure their freedom in the United States, as no other country can be found that will accept them, and then moved on to the resignation of Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commissions, whose departure, after something of a Damascene conversion, has spooked the administration to such an extent that it has dropped charges against five prisoners he represented in an attempt to prevent him from testifying for the defense.

Also included was a discussion about two juveniles in Guantánamo –- the case of Mohamed Jawad, in which deliberately suppressed evidence was discovered by Vandeveld, leading to his outspoken departure, and Omar Khadr, about whom I recently wrote an article following my discovery of a manual on the treatment of juveniles in Guantánamo that was clearly never implemented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.

The show closed with a discussion of the Presidential candidates and their relative positions on Guantánamo and the “War on Terror,” in which I lamented the transformation of John McCain, a lifelong opponent of torture, into the figurehead of a campaign of hatred and fear, and my hopes that, although Barack Obama has chosen –- or been advised –- not to speak about the government’s abuse of executive power in the run-up to the election, he means what he said in a speech in August 2007:

In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.

When I am President, America will reject torture without exception. America is the country that stood against that kind of behavior, and we will do so again … As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists … The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

I thoroughly enjoyed the interview, as ever, and hope to speak to Linda again in the near future.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Following the outspoken resignation of former prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and the Pentagon’s desperate decision to drop charges against five prisoners to prevent Vandeveld from testifying for the defense, the latest news to rock the Commissions is that the trial of Omar Khadr — a supposedly flagship case, along with that of the Yemeni Salim Hamdan, who received a surprisingly light sentence after a trial this summer — has been delayed until after the administration leaves office.

This is a bitter blow for the government, which has been pushing to prosecute Khadr for war crimes since 2005. Its first attempt failed, when the Supreme Court ruled that the whole enterprise was illegal, but after the Commissions were bandaged up by Congress and resumed their ghoulish existence in 2007, Khadr was once more put forward for trial.

This was in spite of the fact that his tenacious lawyers — both military and civilian — have questioned the very basis of the “war crimes” charges (which essentially transform combatants in war into “terrorists”), and have unearthed evidence (despite systemic obstruction) that Khadr may not have been responsible for the main crime for which he is charged (throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier). Focusing on the fact that Khadr was just 15 years old when he was seized in July 2002, they have also persistently pointed out the cruel folly, injustice and illegality of prosecuting a juvenile for war crimes, when the UN Convention on the rights of children in wartime, to which the US is a signatory, requires juveniles — those under the age of 18 when the alleged crime took place — to be rehabilitated rather than punished.

Last week, in pre-trial hearings, they reprised some of these arguments, and also sought access to seven interrogators, from various intelligence agencies, who, they insist, extracted coerced confessions from Khadr, who was severely wounded, while he was detained in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo. According to the lawyers, the information extracted from Khadr under duress was then used as the basis for interrogations at Guantánamo using more “sterile” and “benign” techniques, in much the same way that the administration has attempted to cover up its torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other “high-value detainees” in secret CIA custody by using “clean teams” of FBI agents to extract new confessions in Guantánamo.

As was revealed in Salim Hamdan’s trial, the prohibition on the use of coerced evidence (which was only introduced after the Commissions’ first incarnation was struck down by the Supreme Court, and is still allowable at the judge’s discretion) may technically satisfy the absolute prohibition on the use of evidence obtained through torture, but it has the knock-on effect of effectively erasing the government’s crimes from the record, while also allowing the authorities to obtain “clean” confessions from abused prisoners in a way that would shame all but the most vile totalitarian regimes.

Last week, Khadr’s judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, deferred a decision on the defense’s motion, but as Judy Rabinovitz, an observer for the American Civil Liberties Union, noted, he “did not appear impressed” by the prosecution’s argument that “there ‘needs to be a showing’ by the defense that coercive interrogation practices were used,” which otherwise were only “speculative.” As Rabinovitz noted, touching on the burning issues of the suppression of evidence vital to the defense, which was highlighted in Mohamed Jawad’s case by Lt. Col. Vandeveld, “This line of argument would not likely succeed in a regular military or civilian criminal court, in which the standard for discovery generally places the burden on the government to give the defense information that may assist the defense.” She added that Col. Parrish was also not impressed by the government’s assertion that even providing information about the seven interrogators, three weeks before the trial’s scheduled start date of November 10, would be an “undue burden” on the government.

However, Col. Parrish’s decision to postpone Khadr’s trial until January 26, five days into the new administration, was prompted in particular by defense complaints about the government’s attempts to obstruct an independent psychiatric examination of their client. Although this was first requested in May, it was challenged and resisted by the government in hearings throughout the summer, and as a result a psychiatric expert met Khadr for the first time on October 13. Requesting a postponement of the trial’s start date, the defense pointed out that the expert would need time to establish a rapport with Khadr, and also argued that the delay in providing Khadr with a psychiatric evaluation was largely the government’s fault. As Judy Rabinovitz explained, even when an independent expert had been approved, the prosecution “delayed in providing her the necessary security clearance, and has also failed to provide the defense with Khadr’s psychiatric records.”

Those who have been pressing for the young Canadian’s release will now be hoping that the Canadian government (which is also a signatory to the UN Convention) will finally discover its spine, and will take advantage of the change of administration to demand his return to Canada, or that the new US government will refuse to proceed with the case. Barack Obama, who voted against the Military Commissions Act that revived the trial system in 2006, has pledged to abolish the Military Commissions, which he regards (along with the use of torture, the shredding of the Geneva Conventions, and the sidelining of the US Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice) as key examples of the Bush administration’s quest for “unchecked presidential power,” and even John McCain, who voted for the legislation, may wish to transfer the ailing system to the mainland, and has already explained that he would repatriate Khadr if asked to do so by the Canadian government.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, AlterNet and the Huffington Post.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

The issue is unfettered executive power, and it has been manifested, to the horror of the world, and the dismay of Americans who pride themselves on being a nation founded on the rule of law, in the endorsement of torture as official US policy, the transformation of the CIA into an organization that has run a colossal “extraordinary rendition programme” and a network of secret prisons around the world, and the detention of thousands of prisoners without charge or trial in a legal black hole between the Geneva Conventions and the US court system.

In Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, over 20,000 prisoners in US custody are held neither as Prisoners of War, who would be protected from “humiliating and degrading treatment” and coercive interrogations by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects who will be tried in a US court. The only trials put forward by the government — the Military Commissions at Guantánamo — are so tainted by accusations of pro-prosecution bias and the suppression of exculpatory evidence that the administration is fighting a losing battle to establish their legitimacy, nearly seven years after they were set up by Dick Cheney and David Addington.

In John McCain’s case, his refusal to discuss executive overreach is understandable. Republicans have been encouraged to endorse without question the bellicose rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and to turn a blind eye to the government’s shredding of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Forget the rights of foreign prisoners; warrantless wiretapping and the President’s self-declared right to imprison anyone as an “enemy combatant” — even American citizens — have been sold as vital steps to protect America, rather than a naked power grab by a Vice President who believes, above all, in unfettered executive power.

Although McCain has stated that he wants to close Guantánamo, and has often declared his opposition to the use of torture by US forces, he has flip-flopped horribly as the election has approached. Back in February, he conveniently shelved his lifelong opposition to torture by voting against a bill banning the use of torture by the CIA, and after the Supreme Court ruled, in June, that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights, he declared that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

The disappointment, therefore, is in Barack Obama’s unwillingness to tackle the administration’s crimes head-on. His team has presumably discovered that neither the plight of prisoners held beyond the law nor the executive’s dictatorial power grab is of paramount importance to voters, but this is lamentable for two reasons: firstly, because Obama clearly both knows and cares about the law, and secondly because it is the Bush administration’s quest for unfettered executive power that has led to almost all the ills that currently plague the United States.

On respecting the law, Obama has a proven track record. He has worked with lawyers representing the Guantánamo prisoners, and has consistently voted against ill-conceived “War on Terror” legislation. Last August, in a speech in Washington D.C., he touched on all the issues that are currently lacking in his campaign:

In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.

And as recently as June, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, he declared that the ruling was “an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

This is not only fine oratory; it is also, I believe, essential to Obama’s campaign for change. In order to demonstrate quite how different he is from the Republicans who have brought the country to the brink of ruin, he should use his opposition to the Iraq war as a springboard for an assault on the executive’s power grab, in which all the horrors of the “War on Terror,” outlined above, would also be included. Instead of playing on the folly of an expensive war without end, he should be focusing on the war’s origins, and nailing it as the supreme gesture of a power-crazed executive, acting without restraint and with the arrogant assumption that it has destroyed both the “quaint” principles on which the United States was founded, and the separation of powers that was established to prevent tyranny.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on Liberal Conspiracy.

As conservative columnist George F. Will asked, pertinently, in a Washington Post column on Tuesday, “Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?”

Beyond McCain’s stunted historical memory, his outburst, which is clearly intended to portray Barack Obama as anything other than the rock-hard soldier stallion that McCain is in his imagination, flies in the face of the ever-growing evidence that the entire “War on Terror” imprisonment program has been both chronically brutal and irredeemably flawed, and that Barack Obama is correct to call the ruling “an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

On ABC News on Monday, Obama explained more, saying, “Let’s take the example of Guantánamo. What we know is that in previous terrorist attacks, for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to the rule of law all around the world.”

When McCain’s team followed up by accusing Obama of having “a September 10th mind-set,” the response was both swift and accurate. Obama declared that it was clear that, while McCain was “going to use the Bush-Cheney political playbook that’s based on fear,” he believes that he is “very clear about the threats America faces … and I think, in fact, it’s the failed policies of the Bush administration and the unwillingness to look towards the future that is causing us so many problems around the world.”

On Sunday, in the first story to throw serious doubt on John McCain’s rhetoric, McClatchy Newspapers published the results of an eight-month investigation into the stories of 66 of the 501 prisoners released from Guantánamo, which demonstrated why the Supreme Court was correct to intervene in the cases of the prisoners. In an article introducing the profiles, lead researcher Tom Lasseter wrote that “the dozens of separate tales merge into one: Arrests — often without real evidence — brutality and mistreatment in US interrogations, years of their lives spent behind prison-camp wire in a system of justice that no American citizen would recognize.”

This was almost an understatement, as even the McClatchy report does not make entirely clear that the Guantánamo prisoners required the Supreme Court’s constitutional assistance because, in sidestepping the Geneva Conventions’ battlefield tribunals, which traditionally sort out soldiers from those wrongly detained, and in pressing ahead with alternative tribunals at Guantánamo that relied on generalized and generic unclassified evidence, and classified evidence, withheld from the prisoners, that was often obtained through torture or coercion, the prisoners at Guantánamo have never been screened adequately to determine if they actually do constitute a threat to the United States.

Further proof of the administration’s descent into barbarism came on Tuesday, when it was revealed that an investigation by the Senate Committee on Armed Services into “The Origins of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques” has discovered that senior Pentagon officials began planning to use abusive tactics at Guantánamo Bay in July 2002, three months earlier than has been previously acknowledged. The plan involved borrowing tactics from the military training program known as Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE), whose aim is to teach US soldiers counter-interrogation techniques by subjecting them, in controlled circumstances, to torture techniques including waterboarding (controlled drowning), sleep deprivation, forced nudity, sexual and religious humiliation, and forced standing in painful “stress positions.”

Speaking as the story broke, Sen. Carl Levin, the committee’s chairman, said, “How did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that’s not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees. In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives.” He added, “Some might say that if our personnel go through it in SERE school, what’s wrong with doing it to detainees? Well, our personnel are students and they can call off the training at any time. If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America’s stamp of approval.”

During eight hours of hearings on Tuesday, William J. Haynes II, the former general counsel for the Department of Defense, who was singled out by the committee for investigating the use of SERE techniques in summer 2002, acknowledged that he had pressed for the use of more aggressive techniques, but claimed that the decisions were driven by the administration’s fear of another major terrorist strike. “What I remember about the summer of 2002,” Haynes said, “was a government-wide concern about the possibility of another terrorist attack as the anniversary of September 11” approached. While this was undoubtedly true, Haynes and other senior officials (including President Bush, Vice President Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld) ignored the many voices of others, trained in the use of interrogation, who pointed out that, as well as being morally repugnant, torture was not the way to secure worthwhile confessions.

At the forefront of these complaints, as I have repeatedly pointed out, was the FBI. A recent Department of Justice report (PDF) highlighted the FBI’s opposition to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and retired senior interrogator Dan Coleman, who worked on several high-profile terrorism cases before the 9/11 attacks without using torture, is on record as stating that “people don’t do anything unless they’re rewarded.” In an interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, he acknowledged that brutality — “all that alpha-male shit” — may “yield a timely scrap of information,” but is “completely insufficient” in the longer fight against terrorism. “You need to talk to people for weeks. Years,” he explained. His colleague, Jack Cloonan, had another take on the self-defeating nature of brutality, telling Mayer that it would cut off “the possibility that other people with useful information about al-Qaeda [would] consider becoming informants.” As he explained, “You think all of this stuff about torture is going to make people want to come to us? That’s why I get upset when I hear people talking about stress positions, loud music, and dogs.”

With even less success, Haynes cited “widespread frustration” among Pentagon officials in the summer of 2002 about the slow progress of obtaining information from prisoners in Guantánamo, ignoring the fact that this was the period when some intelligence officials (including CIA representatives) were first concluding that this lack of “actionable intelligence” was unconnected with the prisoners’ supposed resistance to questioning, which was purportedly part of al-Qaeda training, and was, in fact, because the majority of the prisoners had no intelligence to withhold.

In August 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that a senior intelligence official who had spent time at the prison said that “US authorities had netted ‘no big fish’ there,” and that “Some of these guys literally don’t know the world is round,” and in September 2002, a top-secret CIA study reported in a New York Times article in June 2004, “raised questions about [the prisoners’] significance, suggesting that many of the accused terrorists appeared to be low-level recruits who went to Afghanistan to support the Taliban or even innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war,” according to “current and former officials who read the assessment.” Or, as Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, a member of the first military legal team established to work on proposed prosecutions for prisoners at Guantánamo, told the New York Times in October 2004, “It became obvious to us as we reviewed the evidence that, in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield. We literally found guys who had been shot in the butt.”

Reports on the hearings have focused on the widespread opposition to the administration’s policies from other law enforcement agencies. The Washington Post reported that “Haynes and other Pentagon officials acknowledged that the proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law,” and cited Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, whose criticisms have been largely overlooked.

In an October 2002 e-mail to colleagues in the Pentagon, Fallon warned that the techniques under discussion would “shock the conscience of any legal body” that might review how the interrogations were conducted. “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,” he wrote, adding, “Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.” In October 2006, when MSNBC ran a major feature on various agencies’ opposition to the administration’s tactics — which included a profile of Fallon — his boss, Col. Brittain P. Mallow, the commander of the task force from 2002 to 2005, also spoke out. “No. 1, it’s not going to work,” Col. Mallow said. “No. 2, if it does work, it’s not reliable. No. 3, it may not be legal, ethical or moral. No. 4, it’s going to hurt you when you have to prosecute these guys. No. 5, sooner or later, all of this stuff is going to come to light, and you’re going to be embarrassed.”

Even more significant than the CITF’s criticisms, however, was the opposition to the administration’s policies that was waged by Alberto J. Mora, the head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which, like the CITF, was also involved in non-violent intelligence gathering at Guantánamo. When Mora was informed about the Pentagon-sanctioned abuse that was taking place, he took his complaints to the highest levels, confronting both Donald Rumsfeld and William Haynes. His principled struggle — which was ultimately unsuccessful — was first reported in detail in another extraordinary New Yorker article by Jane Mayer in February 2006, and Mora also features heavily in the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, and in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

On Tuesday, Alberto J. Mora appeared before the Senate committee, condemning the policies now apparently supported by John McCain with a clarity and indignation that should serve as a rallying cry to all decent Americans. Mora declared:

[O]ur Nation’s policy decision to use so-called “harsh” interrogation techniques during the War on Terror was a mistake of massive proportions. It damaged and continues to damage our Nation in ways that appear never to have been considered or imagined by its architects and supporters, whose policy focus seems to have been narrowly confined to the four corners of the interrogation room. This interrogation policy — which may aptly be labeled a “policy of cruelty” — violated our founding values, our constitutional system and the fabric of our laws, our over-arching foreign policy interests, and our national security. The net effect of this policy of cruelty has been to weaken our defenses, not to strengthen them, and has been greatly contrary to our national interest.

He continued:

The United States was founded on the principle that every person — not just each citizen — possesses certain inalienable rights that no government, including our own, may violate. Among these rights is unquestionably the right to be free from cruel punishment or treatment, as is evidenced in part by the clear language of the Eighth Amendment and the constitutional jurisprudence of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. If we can apply the policy of cruelty to detainees, it is only because our Founders were wrong about the scope of inalienable rights. With the adoption of this policy our founding values necessarily begin to be redefined and our constitutional structure and the fabric of our legal system start to erode.

In conclusion, he added, “Albert Camus cautioned against nations fighting for their values against selecting those weapons whose very use would destroy those values. In this War on Terror, the United States is fighting for our values, and cruelty is such a weapon.”

Are you listening, John McCain?

Note: The testimony of the majority of speakers at the Senate committee meeting is available here (though sadly William Haynes neglected to offer a transcript). Timelines of the administration’s adoption of “Aggressive Interrogation Techniques” can be found on Salon, and on Sen. Levin’s website, linked above.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on Anti-war.com, the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

Now here’s an interesting development. A close study of the front-runners in the Presidential primaries reveals that all have called for the closure of Guantánamo, with the exception of Mitt Romney, who famously declared, during a televised GOP debate last May, “I am glad [the detainees] are at Guantánamo. I don’t want them on our soil. I want them on Guantánamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is we ought to double Guantánamo.”

Both of the Democrat front-runners –- Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton –- have made a point of including plans to close the prison on their websites. Senator Obama’s site includes a commitment to restore habeas corpus to the Guantánamo detainees, and a speech he made in Washington D.C. last August, in which he declared, “in the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.”

He added, “When I am President, America will reject torture without exception. America is the country that stood against that kind of behavior, and we will do so again,” and made the following pledge with regard to Guantánamo, “I also will reject a legal framework that does not work. There has been only one conviction at Guantánamo. It was for a guilty plea on material support for terrorism. The sentence was nine months. There has not been one conviction of a terrorist act. I have faith in America’s courts, and I have faith in our JAGs [the military lawyers of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps]. As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

Hillary Clinton’s website also includes a prominent call for the closure of Guantánamo, although she is vaguer on the details, and, as the Miami Herald has pointed out, “she has not prominently included pledges to do it in her campaign speeches.” The following comment was made during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last April: “Guantánamo has become associated in the eyes of the world with a discredited administration policy of abuse, secrecy, and contempt for the rule of law. Rather than keeping us more secure, keeping Guantánamo open is harming our national interests. It compromises our long-term military and strategic interests, and it impairs our standing overseas. I have certainly concluded that we should address any security issues on what to do with the remaining detainees, and then close it once and for all.”

Of the Republicans, John McCain remains as opposed to the existence of Guantánamo as he is to torture, although he apparently believes in the much-criticized system of trials by Military Commission (and does not appear to have included his opposition to Guantánamo on his website). Speaking to 60 Minutes last April, he declared, “I would close Guantánamo Bay. And I would move those prisoners to Fort Leavenworth. And I would proceed with the tribunals.” He went on to explain, “Guantánamo Bay has become an image throughout the world which has hurt our reputation. Whether we deserve it or not, the reality is Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have harmed our reputation in the world, thereby harming our ability to win the psychological part of the war against radical Islamic extremism.”

Even Mike Huckabee joined in recently, explaining, after meeting a group of retired generals who were urging all the candidates to commit to opposing torture, that he supported the closure of Guantánamo. That wasn’t what he said last June, however, when he conceded that the government’s handling of Guantánamo had come to symbolize “what’s gone wrong” in the fight against terrorism, but concluded that it was better to err “on the side of protecting the American people,” adding, contentiously, that conditions for detainees in Guantánamo –- who are, of course, held without charge or trial –- were better than in US prisons on the mainland.

Talk is fine, of course, and it’s admirable, I think, that any of the candidates mentioned above would go out of their way to pledge the closure of Guantánamo, when it still, sadly, remains a marginal issue compared to the war in Iraq and the usual dominant concerns of the electorate: the economy, healthcare and education.

Given that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have expressed their desire to close Guantánamo in no uncertain terms, it’s a tribute to the substance of Senator Obama’s involvement in the plans to shut the prison (as opposed to the oft-repeated opinion that his visionary charisma is not necessarily backed up by solid policies) that 85 lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees, including many who have become known to me during my research for The Guantánamo Files and its subsequent promotion (plus a judge and two retired rear admirals), have singled out his campaign for their endorsement, citing his “extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue,” and providing concrete examples of his commitment to closing Guantánamo once and for all.

The full text of the lawyers’ letter –- and its signatories –- is reproduced below.

HABEAS LAWYERS SUPPORT OBAMA

January 28, 2008

Dear Friends:

We are at a critical point in the Presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantánamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama.

The Administration’s Guantánamo policies have undercut our values at home and stained our reputation around the world. All of us are lawyers who have worked on the Guantánamo habeas corpus litigation for many years, some of us since early 2002, and we were all deeply involved in opposing the Administration’s attempt to overturn the Supreme Court’s Rasul decision by stripping the courts of jurisdiction to hear the Guantánamo cases. We have talked with Senator Obama about why the Guantánamo litigation is so significant, and we have worked closely with Senator Obama in the fight to preserve habeas corpus.

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantánamo. He has understood that our strength as a nation stems from our commitment to our core values, and that we are strong enough to protect both our security and those values. Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantánamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates.

The writ of habeas corpus dates to the Magna Carta, and was enshrined by the Founders in our Constitution. The Administration’s attack on habeas corpus rights is dangerous and wrong. America needs a President who will not triangulate this issue. We need a President who will restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community. Based on our work with him, we are convinced that Senator Obama can do this because he truly feels these issues “in his bones.”

We urge you to support Senator Obama.

We encourage you to forward this message to anyone who might be interested.

Gary A. Isaac (Chicago, Illinois)
Elizabeth P. Gilson (New Haven, Connecticut)
Joshua Colangelo Bryan (New York, New York)
Thomas B. Wilner (Washington, DC)
Ismail Alsheik (Chicago, Illinois)
Diane Marie Amann (Berkeley, California)
Elizabeth Arora (Washington, DC)
Baher Azmy (Brooklyn, New York)
Scott Barker (Denver, Colorado)
Douglas Behr (Potomac, Maryland)
G. Michael Bellinger (Glen Ridge, New Jersey)
Amanda Shafer Berman (Washington, DC)
Catherine A. Bernard (Chicago, Illinois)
Carolyn Patty Blum (New York, New York)
Patricia A. Bronte (Chicago, Illinois)
Carol Elder Bruce (McLean, Virginia)
Charles Carpenter (Washington, DC)
Jennifer Ching (Brooklyn, New York)
George M. Clarke (Washington, DC)
Jerry Cohen (Boston, Massachusetts)
John J. Connolly (Baltimore, Maryland)
David J. Cynamon (Chevy Chase, Maryland)
Joshua W. Denbeaux (Westwood, New Jersey)
Mark P. Denbeaux (Newark, New Jersey)
James Dorsey (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Rebecca Dick (Arlington, Virginia)
Wells Dixon (New York, New York)
Heather Lewis Donnell (Chicago, Illinois)
Buz Eisenberg (Ashfield, Massachusetts)
Marc Falkoff (Chicago, Illinois)
Tina Monshipour Foster (Queens, New York)
Murray Fogler (Houston, Texas)
Matthew Freimuth (New York, New York)
Hon. John J. Gibbons (Newark, New Jersey)
Jared Goldstein (Providence, Rhode Island)
R. David Gratz (Westwood, New Jersey)
Eldon Greenberg (Washington, DC)
Dean Donald J. Guter, Rear Admiral, JAGC, USN (Ret.)
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Gitanjali Gutierrez (Ithaca, New York)
Jonathan Hafetz (Brooklyn, New York)
Osman A. Handoo (Falls Church, Virginia)
Sarah Havens (New York, New York)
Gaillard T. Hunt (Silver Spring, Maryland)
Kristine Huskey (Austin, Texas)
Varda Hussain (Arlington, Virginia)
Dean John D. Hutson, Rear Admiral, JAGC, USN (Ret.)
(Concord, New Hampshire)
Thomas R. Johnson (Portland, Oregon)
Stephen J. Kane (Chicago, Illinois)
Zachary Katznelson (San Francisco, California)
Michael Y. Kieval (Bethesda, Maryland)
Daniel Kirschner (New York, New York)
Jan Kitchel (Portland, Oregon)
Eric Lewis (Bethesda, Maryland)
Ellen Lubell (Newton, Massachusetts)
Lawrence S. Lustberg (Newark, New Jersey)
J. Triplett Mackintosh (Denver, Colorado)
Emi MacLean (New York, New York)
Brian D. Maddox (Brooklyn, New York)
Neil McGaraghan (Boston, Massachusetts)
Brent Mickum (Bethesda, Maryland)
Nicole M. Moen (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Daniel P. Moylan (Baltimore, Maryland)
Richard G. Murphy, Jr. (Washington, DC)
William J. Murphy (Baltimore, Maryland)
Brian J. Neff (South Orange, New Jersey)
Stephen H. Oleskey (Boston, Massachusetts)
Charles H.R. Peters (Chicago, Illinois)
Kit A. Pierson (Washington, DC)
Jason Pinney (Boston, Massachusetts)
Wesley R. Powell (New York, New York)
Robert D. Rachlin (Burlington, Vermont)
Jana Ramsey (Brooklyn, New York)
Michael Ratner (New York, New York)
David H. Remes (Silver Spring, Maryland)
Jeffrey D. Robinson (Laurel, Maryland)
Brent Rushforth (Washington, DC)
James C. Schroeder (Chicago, Illinois)
Jessica Sherman (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Michael J. Sternhell (Brooklyn, New York)
Jeffrey M. Strauss (Chicago, Illinois)
Mark Sullivan (Bedford Hills, New York)
Danielle R. Voorhees (Denver, Colorado)
Vincent Warren (New York, New York)
Carolyn Welshhans (Arlington, Virginia)
P. Sabin Willett (Boston, Massachusetts)
Jill M. Williamson (Takoma Park, Maryland)
Elizabeth A. Wilson (Washington, DC)
Jeff Wu (Rockville, Maryland)

For further information, contact Gary A. Isaac at (312) 701-7025.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

A version of this article was published on the Huffington Post.