Unfortunately I posted and deleted immediately so i am blocked till tomorrow.
will post early…
the gist is related to EWs post from May 13: http://emptywheel.firedoglake……l-qahtani/

Basically, I think they dropped al Qahtani because he had a working relationship with his defense lawyer. And that meant he would mount a defense and slow down the show. The Admin wants so bad for these detainees to drop their lawyers that they even let KSM intimidate!!! the only one whose lawyers were trying to put up a defense. Read this link on the intimidation: http://www.miamiherald.com/gua…..59602.html

A gross practical failure of criminal law. they are not even trying to put on a pretense of fairness.

anyway IMHO it is a good post but what’s a kosser to do?

Can nobody make this stop? Gates?

Good catch bmaz. I heard the same thing on NPR yesterday. Apparently one of the defendants in particular seemed reluctant to reject his lawyer, but did so under pressure from KSM. This particular defendant (whose name I can’t recall) is weak and thin and had to sit on a pillow in court. His lawyer was livid that KSM was allowed to interfere with his client’s defense, but it sounded like his objections fell on deaf ears.

Seems like there is not much honor to go around in those “court” rooms. KSM was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives before his capture and he is still willing to do so, only this time the American military is happy to lend him a hand. Nice. Good to know we are all on the same team now.

Jim White:

They are setting the stage to threaten Bush, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and others with being shipped off to The Hague if they don’t cooperate fully with the investigation. Will they have the balls to follow through?

I think we’re safely at the point where the congress critters who do NOT go after BushCo for war crimes will be the ones losing their seats. But hell, I’ve been thinking that for a long old time.

bmaz, I was going to marvel earlier at their unerring “instinct” for the jugular of our system of laws. It’s not just that they break serious laws and violate the Constitution. They really go all out against such underpinnings as habeas corpus, right to counsel, access to courts, citizenship, any potential avenue by which a petitioner might then attempt redress of immediate violations. It’s what makes them truly unspeakable. Unfortunately, it is also what there is too little evidence of anyone in Washington having grasped (though I’m certainly glad to see today’s letter from the Congresspeople).

I’m not sure they’re trying to get this in before the election. I think that what they’re doing is trying to get these men executed before Cheney leaves office. I don’t think this is political theater for the American people. I think it’s just pure spite from Cheney. He wants them dead. And, as always, he doesn’t care how many laws he needs to trample to get what he wants.

Hi there. I see that TRex is down, so you can’t follow Spook’s link to my comment there. here’s the letter in full that I received from John Walcott at McClatchey, after I sent him your post, bmaz, asking that McClatchey feature this issue more prominently:

Thanks for writing.
Fear not, and stay tuned. Next Sunday, June 15, McClatchy will begin publishing the most extensive investigation to date of the treatment of detainees, not only at Guantanamo but also at Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan. Reporters Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield tracked down and interviewed 66 former detainees-more than any other organization, media or NGO, we think- in 11 countries on three continents.
They also interviewed former prison guards, interrogators, translators, Pentagon and administration officials, defense lawyers and Afghan intelligence and security officials to paint the most complete picture we could of who U.S. picked up, how and why, what happened to “suspected enemy combatants” and who’s responsible.
The package was overseen by the McClatchy Washington Bureau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign editor, Roy Gutman, the editor of “Crimes of War” and the author of a new book on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan before 9/11. It includes five main stories, a video, photos, numerous sidebars, the stories of all 66 former detainees and an online database.
If you don’t live in an area served by one of our papers, or even if you do, you can find the whole package at http://www.mcclatchydc.com starting on Sunday, June 15 and running for five days.
Please pass the word, and thanks again for writing.
John Walcott

There is some nice gathering of sources for this post. Local lawyers who have volunteered to work at Gitmo who are experienced from excellent law firms have been saying for a couple years that Gitmo is a surrealistic travesty.

Looming large over Gitmo is a Supreme Court opinion that could be released as early as tomorrow. Those companion cases are Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196).

One book I have meant to read that is not on Gitmo per se but sure provides the context for it and DOJ’s very systemic contribution to it was reviewed in the NYT Book Review this morning, Review Erich Lichtblau’s Bush’s Law I think reading this review will make people want to read the book.

Then there are the victims of the administration’s frantic, post-9/11 bloodhounds, who rounded up hundreds of people and held them incommunicado, mostly without charges, and occasionally prosecuting them simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, had the wrong names and religions, were wrongly identified or were drawn into conspiracies wholly created by the F.B.I. Not Afghans and Pakistanis, mind you, who were swept up on the battlefield or kidnapped off the streets and thrown into Guantánamo or secret jails, only to be quietly released years later without so much as a fare-thee-well. Too often it was the guy next door, people like Brandon Mayfield, who became part of the collateral damage of the “war on terror.”

A 37-year-old Oregon lawyer in 2004, Mayfield was wrongly linked to the Madrid train bombing by imperious F.B.I. agents who brushed aside the cautions of Spanish investigators and matched a fingerprint found at the scene to his. It was a terrible mistake. What drove the investigation was the fact that Mayfield, an Army veteran, had married an Egyptian-born woman who had come to the United States at age 5. A slow convert to Islam, he attended the same Portland mosque as Arab immigrants who had earlier been arrested as terrorists.

Lichtblau, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times, adds creepy new details to previous accounts of the case. You feel the growing apprehension, then fear, as Mayfield, his wife and children detect that someone has been secretly breaking into their house for many weeks. One day one of the children is at home as the door handle jiggles. He scurries to the attic, terrified.

This is Cujo, not homeland security. Mayfield was detained and, according to his lawyers, threatened with the death penalty. Only the Spaniards’ eventual arrest of the fingerprint’s real owner, an Algerian, saved him.

I’d like to make it very clear that in full view of every attorney who has recently or is now practicing in the SDNY and every bar association that is vibrant there, Mike Mukasey as a district court judge was a very active dysfunctional participant in the rounding up of hundreds of innocent “material witnesses.” Hence, people I know call him “Material Witness Mukasey.”

Someone asked Bmaz the other day about the prospects of suing the government for malicious prosecution. Congress has set the bar very high in the code section that controls it, with enough legislative intent language to make it difficult to do, and easy for law clerks straight out of law school to pen the case law that reenforces that difficulty.

But attorney Branden Mayfield, arrested in Portland Oregon did it, and he took several million dollars from the pricks and prickesses at DOJ (in reality he took your gas money that these people squandered with their dishonesty and inept, incompetent egregious lawyering–something that has become a Main Justice trademark in the Bush administration and makes former AUSAs I know cringe. Mayfield is a Muslim. You should get very used to that word because the McCain campaign and their 527s are going to morph it into profanity reinforcing the vibrant pulsing bigotry that is a stong part of the infrastructure of many US citizens.

Elden Rosenthal, an Oregon civil rights attorneyrepresented Lichtblau when he sued the government.

Rosenthal successfully overturned parts of the Patriot Act’s provisions on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. He won a $2 million settlement and public apology from the federal government for his client Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully jailed for two weeks as a presumed terrorist in connection with the Madrid bombings. The settlement preserved Mayfield’s right to sue over the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act which authorized his detention, and Rosenthal continues to litigate those issues. Bad fingerprint analysis, lying FBI agents, religious discrimination, wrongful detention — Mayfield v. USA remains the most prominent test case of the PATRIOT Act in the courts today.

An objective view of Mukasey reviews a dark, cowardly cowed and compliant little bureaucrat who has little or no respect for Rule of Law.

Outstanding post.

The appeal to apocalyptic eschatologies is really not something that is novel from a historical perspective. And from a humane point of view is it really any wonder that this administration came into power on campaigns championing Fukyama’s End of History and other idealistic “new paradigms” of knowledge. In this approach the lessons of time are but material for pompous costumes in a naive self-aggrandizing farce.

Consider this renunciation of the pitfalls of this political trop as it was acted out in Russia in the mid-Twentieth Century:

O, we Russians paid dearly for the unconditional trust we placed in a strong-willed man, whom many of us viewed as a benefactor of humanity. We will not repeat the same mistake! There are signs that distinguish a person worthy of such a mission from an evil genius. The latter is gloomy; the former is bright with spiritual vitality. One consolidates power with executions and torture; the other will not spend a single day seeking power, and when that individual accepts power no one’s blood will be spilled. Once will cultivate the cult of personality across the land; the other will consider such glorification ridiculous and repellent. Once is unapproachable; the other is open to all. One is wracked by an unquenchable thirst for life and power and hides from imagined dangers behind impenetrable walls; the other is free from worldly temptation and calm in the face of danger, with a clean conscience and unshakable faith. They are two antipodes, the ambassadors of two irreconcilable camps.

The Rose of the World, Daniel Andreev. An apocalyptic view relieves the actor of being accountable to history and the possibility of adaptation. A sad day for American jurisprudence indeed.

Yikes! “Once” = “One” twice.

So Boumediene SHOULD give them an escape hatch.
But:
1. Electing to go pro se requires them to want to defend and not be martyred…
2. Delaying proceedings requires judge to rule- and didn’t we have a judge replacement recently because the prior one was too fair?

”some attorneys who have tried to represent Gitmo detainees claim they are being taped at all times and very limited in access to their clients and even in what they can use to take notes and there are now suits against the government for not providing client attorney confidentiality at Gitmo.”

Makes it pretty clear how they knew to split al Qahtani out of the prosecution of 5.

And if you believe pushing the show trials forward is important to the DOD and Administration, this may explain how KSM might have been tipped off to al Hawsawi collaborating with lawyers to mount a possible defense (someone told him).