New York Times Editorial: It’s Time to Close Gitmo

Here is a powerful editorial from The New York Times arguing for the need to close the gulag at Guantánamo Bay:

Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.

The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.

On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.

If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.

There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.

Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

It is time to get rid of it.

Here is a link to the editorial:

• Gitmo: A National Disgrace

13-Year-Old Girl Refuses to Remove Hijab Despite Public Ridicule by School Supervisor

This 13-year-old girl's bravery is a shining example for us all. From the Monterey County Herald:

A confrontation over a head scarf in the lunchroom of Seaside High School between a school supervisor and a 13-year-old student has led for a call for a public apology from the official by a major Islamic organization.

The San Francisco/Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR, said the girl, an incoming freshman, was told by the supervisor Tuesday to remove her hajib, an Islamic head scarf.

After explaining that she wore it for religious reasons, the supervisor, according to the CAIR statement, then demanded in front of more than 100 other students, “You have to take it off now.”

The girl, who was taking a summer algebra class, then broke down in tears, said CAIR, but did not remove her scarf.

Read more:

• Monterey County Herald: Muslim girl told to remove scarf

Police Arrest 13-Year-Old for a Yearbook Joke

Perhaps the police will start raiding Islamic pre-schools next.

From the East Valley Tribune:

Ban Abdulghafoor did not expect to hear the voice of a Gilbert police officer on the line when she answered the phone last Thursday.

It was the final day of school at Mesquite Junior High School, and her 13-year-old son, Mustafa Abdul Razzaq, decided to stay home because it was a halfday. The call woke him from his late-morning slumber.

While Mustafa was asleep, Gilbert police were looking for him at school. This was going on as his fellow students were being evacuated at the school after a parent reported what appeared to be two bomb threats written in her son’s yearbook.

A boy named David signed one of the threats, implying that he might try to bomb the courtyard. The other threat was signed with Mustafa’s name.

Read more:

• East Valley Tribune: Police find Gilbert teen innocent in bomb scare

Tracking Transience: Telling Big Brother Where You Are 24/7

Although this probably isn’t advisable for most American Muslims simply because of the sheer volume of civil liberty abuses by the U.S. government, it’s an interesting experiment. Check out his Web site in the links at the end of the post.

An excerpt from a Wired Magazine article:

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

Read more:

• Professor Hasan Elahi’s Web Site: Tracking Transience
• Wired Magazine: The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

Time: Was Gonzales’ Emergency Visit Illegal?

It appears that Alberto Gonzales may have committed a serious federal crime when he was the White House counsel. Here is an excerpt from a Time article:

When then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales went to John Ashcroft’s hospital room on the evening of March 10, 2004 to ask the ailing Attorney General to override Justice Department officials and reauthorize a secret domestic wiretapping program, he was acting inappropriately, Ashcroft’s deputy at the time, James Comey, testified before Congress earlier this week. But the question some lawyers, national security experts and Congressional investigators are now asking is: Was Gonzales in fact acting illegally?

In dramatic testimony Tuesday, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he raced to the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital that evening to intercept Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card and prevent them from convincing Ashcroft to reauthorize the program after Justice Department lawyers had concluded that it was illegal. Comey, who during Ashcroft’s stay in the hospital was acting Attorney General, has told Congressional investigators that when he arrived at the room and began explaining to Ashcroft why he was there, he was intentionally “very circumspect” so as not to disclose classified information in an unsecure setting and in front of Ashcroft’s wife, Janet, who was at his bedside and was apparently not authorized to know about the program.

Comey described what happened next: “The door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the Attorney General very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.” Ashcroft bluntly rebuffed Gonzales, but Comey’s unwillingness publicly to say what Gonzales said in the hospital room has raised questions about whether Gonzales may have violated executive branch rules regarding the handling of highly classified information, and possibly the law preventing intentional disclosure of national secrets.

“Executive branch rules require sensitive classified information to be discussed in specialized facilities that are designed to guard against the possibility that officials are being targeted for surveillance outside of the workplace,” says Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal, who was National Security Advisor to the Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. “The hospital room of a cabinet official is exactly the type of target ripe for surveillance by a foreign power,” Katyal says. This particular information could have been highly sensitive. Says one government official familiar with the Terrorist Surveillance Program: “Since it’s that program, it may involve cryptographic information,” some of the most highly protected information in the intelligence community.

Read more:

• Time: Was Gonzales’ Emergency Visit Illegal?

Thoughts on the FBI Assault Incident at UC Irvine

In today’s climate, it’s usually the FBI who is running after Muslims, whether to instill fear, step on basic civil liberties, follow a weak or fabricated lead, or – on a very rare occasion – investigate an actual crime.

But think about the irony of what took place at UC Irvine last week (for reference, read the previous blog post on this issue). Muslims were running after the FBI. And they weren’t doing it to instill fear, step on civil liberties, or follow a weak or fabricated lead. They witnessed an FBI agent commit a crime, and chased him down, while he fled.

And what were the Muslim students at UC Irvine doing in the first place to warrant being under the watchful eye of the FBI? They were merely holding an anti-Zionism week to showcase the racism, apartheid and crimes that are inherent with Zionism. No crimes were committed.

And this was after they held a Holocaust Memorial Week, when they held programs highlighting the genocides committed in Nazi Germany, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the slaughter of Native American during Manifest Destiny.

The Muslim students at UC Irvine should be applauded for their ability to hold programs covering pertinent and controversial issues, as well as their ability to turn the tables on an ever-abusive FBI.