Remember Mohamedou Slahi, the Gitmo detainee who they loaded onto a boat and drove around to give him the impression he was being moved? The judge in his habeas case has just ordered him released–though we don’t know why yet. (h/t cs)
Slahi is the 34th Guantánamo detainee ordered freed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled detainees could challenge their incarceration in federal court, but his name was already well known because of investigations into detainee abuse.
Those probes found Slahi had been subjected to sleep deprivation, exposed to extremes of heat and cold, moved around the base blindfolded, and at one point taken into the bay on a boat and threatened with death. Investigators also found interrogators had told him they would arrest his mother and have her jailed as the only female detainee at Guantánamo if he did not cooperate.
The interrogations were so abusive a highly regarded Pentagon lawyer, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, quit the case five years ago rather than prosecute him at the Bush administration’s first effort to stage military commissions.
Read the whole Carol Rosenberg story. As she notes, the judge in question, James Robertson, has had just one other habeas case. And in spite of the fact that he found that case to be “gossamer thin,” he upheld that prisoner’s detention. Suggesting he has ruled Slahi released either because of the torture he underwent (including threats of death that–we know from the OPR Report–John Yoo had warned were clearly torture), or he was set up in a major way.
And, as Rosenberg further notes, Robertson is the guy who first ruled Hamdan’s case to be unconstitutional.
Golly, you think a judge will finally challenge the notion that the government can just detain someone indefinitely because we tortured him into a false confession?