H. Candace Gorman
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay -- or Azkaban, as one of my clients, a Harry Potter fan, calls it -- have had no access to a hearing in a court of law. Instead, Guantanamo's inmates are subjected to two kangaroo procedures: Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Boards.
The tribunals determine whether an individual is an enemy combatant. Needless to say, the cards are stacked against the prisoner from the get-go. The tribunals are allowed to rely on hearsay evidence and information acquired though coercion. Any evidence deemed "secret" is withheld from the prisoner. Can you imagine trying to defend yourself against evidence kept secret from you?
Amazingly, my client Abdul Al-Ghizzawi (a Libyan who ran a bakery in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, before being handed to Americans for a bounty in late 2001), was found to have no ties to terrorism and not to be an enemy combatant. Unfortunately, the higher-ups intervened and the tribunal's judgment was overturned six weeks later upon the miraculous discovery of "new evidence." I saw the classified proceedings of my client's tribunals, and I can assure you that no new material was considered. Mark and Joshua Denbeaux, authors of the study "No-Hearing Hearings," have discovered that some prisoners went through as many as three hearings before the tribunals made the "correct" determination that a prisoner had ties to terrorism.>>>>snip
Ali sees parallels between George W. Bush and J.K. Rowling's arch-villain, Voldemort. Guantanamo is the real-world equivalent of Azkaban, the cheerless prison guarded by the soulless Dementors.>>>>>>snip
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/15/ING47P6V8U1.DTL--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE IRISH TIMES INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY CLINTON
But would you close Guantanamo?
"I'm not going to speculate on that now. I think that's the kind of tactical decision that has to be considered depending on what the real facts are at the time. "
http://www.ireland.com/focus/2007/clinton/index.html