Misplacing The Metrics

by digby

The Talking Dog has complied the most impressive set of interviews with lawyers and others about the torture regime on the internet. He's as well versed in the evidence and testimony of those involved in the issue as anyone. What he says here is absolutely right.

I cannot emphasize that strongly enough: we MUST hold The President's feet to the fire with respect to what he has made one of the signal aims of his Administration, to wit, the closure of Guantanamo Bay and related illegal facilities. So, although it comes as no surprise to anyone that, as WaPo reports, the Government's files re the allegations against Guantanamo detainees are in disarray (hat tip to Candace), we simply cannot stand by and allow one of the possible permutations raised in the article, that the Obama Administration may attempt to blame its precedessor for delays in doing what it said it would, i.e. closing Guantanamo, and its companion and (far) more important promise, restoring the rule of law.

Let me make this easy, based on my extrapolating from Candace's representations and from the dozens more I am familiar with from the interviews conducted on this blog: there's simply no there there. The reason that the Government's "evidence" is "in disarray" is because if it were well-organized, it would be obvious to all that it is, as the courageous Col. Stephen Abraham called it, "garbage". Nothing more than a bunch of guilt-by-association accusations, often derived from torture, or from other sources that the Government itself believes unreliable.

Look people: why should we believe the Bush Administration ON ANYTHING? Of the decisions that have gone that far, in actual "on the merits" hearings, detainees are winning 90% of them, even in courts that have demonstrated their predisposition to be hostile to the detainees at every turn heretofore. Now why might that be? Might it be because there is no there there... that the Bush Administration held men not because they were or are dangerous, but because it would be embarrassing to release them?

The President has directed a stay of prosecutions for 120 days, and ordered a shut-down within a year. Both of those are way, way too long periods, given what everyone knows (i.e., there is simply no reason to believe anything the Bush Administration did is reliable, so why should this be different). But, notwithstanding my unwavering support for my college classmate The President, we cannot allow any slippage on this: it's too important. To quote The President himself, we cannot compromise our principles in the interests of expedience.

The Bush Administration has, indeed, left a mess. But the default has got to be that if, after more than seven years, we cannot quickly ascertain a legal basis to hold someone... we probably don't have one. We must all be mature enough to know that there is a difference you can sail the Queen Mary through between someone being a terrorist because they are an actual terrorist and someone being a terrorist because the Bush Administration said they were. There is evidence, or there isn't. It doesn't matter how bad the acts of the accused are: what matters is whether we have reliable evidence of their guilt. Nothing short thereof, whether it be KSM or anyone else, will be acceptable.

The administration wanted to "send a message" by creating a myth that they were omnipotent gods who were capturing all the "bad guys," giving them drugs and forced enemas and putting them in a concentration camp. But it was, like most Mayberry Machiavelli marketing, not reality. There is very little "evidence" and a whole lot of hype. They did use a flurry of useless paperwork as their "metric" in the early years, but it was all derived from torture, threats and lies.

It would appear that people like Geoffrey Miller, Barbara Fast, Dick Cheney, Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz and others are all going to sail into history unpunished for their records on torture. They are walking around free. The least we can do is give their former prisoners a trial as soon as possible or let them go.

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