Laura Rozen rocks, and today she rolls up more jaw dropping malevolence and fraud on the part of the Bush/Cheney Administration.
A potentially explosive new court filing by the lawyers for Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Guantanamo detainees suggests that the Bush administration ordered the Bosnian government to arrest and hold the men after an exhaustive Bosnian investigation had found them innocent of any terrorism related activity and had ordered their release, in order to use them as props in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union speech.
The filing–"Lakhdar Boumediene, et al., Petitioners, v. George W. Bush, President of the United States, et al., Respondents, Petitioners’ Public Traverse to the Government’s Return to the Petition for Habeas Corpus"–lays out the case that the Bush administration threatened at the highest levels to withdraw diplomatic and military aid to the Balkan nation if Bosnia released the men, which its own three-month investigation had found innocent of any terrorism charges in the days leading up to Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union.
Faced with the threats of the withdrawal of aid and that if it released the men, the White House would order NATO troops to detain them, Bosnia transferred the men under duress to the custody of the US government in January 2002. Ten days later, Bush used sixteen words to warn Americans that, in "cooperation" with the Bosnian government, it had captured terrorists who had planned to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo: "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush told the nation.
But, six years later, the detainees’ petition says, after the US Supreme Court has sided with the detainees and ordered the US to give the detainees habeas corpus rights, the Bush administration has failed to repeat the embassy plot charges that Bush used in his State of the Union address, or to produce credible evidence of why the men should be held as enemy combatants.
It is hard to be shocked by these kind of revelations anymore, there has been so much criminal depravity on the part of the Bush/Cheney crew in relation to their torture and sadistic gulag detention programs that it just dulls the senses after a while. And it is not like we didn’t know that the case against Lakhdar Boumediene was bogus; that was evident from the prior litigation that led to the original Supreme Court Boumediene decision. The pleading containing the new allegations is here (pdf). For those of you perplexed by the title of the pleading, a "traverse" pleading is nothing more than a somewhat archaic term for a reply pleading.
The revelation that Boumediene has been, from the outset, about yet another 16 word intentional lie to the American public, and indeed the world, in the hallowed State of the Union Speech, in order to fraudulently gin up the basis for an illegal and immoral war of aggression, is heart stopping and hard to stomach. We already had a 16 word blatant lie by Bush for this purpose. Crikey, how many other 16 word lies are out there?
As I said, we knew the detention and persecution of Boumediene and the others known as the "Algerian Six" was unjustified and unsupportable, but the similarities to the other "16 Word" scandal are striking.
Both cases involved facts that the Bush/Cheney Administration possessed and knew were patently false, and yet cravenly used in the State Of The Union to sell their desire for war of choice and aggression. Both involved bordering Islamic countries in Northwestern Africa. Both were hurriedly put in the SOTU to gin up the war on terror and lay the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq that both Bush and Cheney were jonesing for since before they took office. And both were linchpins in the respective SOTU speeches in 2002 and 2003, seeking to sell and con the public for support by the Bushies.
Repetitive analogous conduct, in similar situations, over time. This is what in the law is known as pattern and practice evidence. Hard to say something is a mistake if you keep making that same "mistake" over and over and over. Well, the Bush/Cheney Administration has a crystal clear pattern and practice of using 16 word snippets of fraud to sell war to the American people. I wonder if Condiliar Rice will blithely laugh off the new "16 Word" fraud as overblown nonsense the way she did the original "16 Word" scandal?