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Detainees in Guantanamo

I haven't posted anything for a while with the holidays and all. I'll get back to recounting what happened a few years ago, but something has been sticking in my craw for a while. I know there's the War on Terror going on, at least according to CNN and the government, but what is happening down there in Gitmo with all the detainess from Afghanistan and other ports-of-call, who are supposed to be enemy combatants.

There are still about 660 detainess languishing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A big deal was made about the 60 who were released recently, like it was some kind of humanitarian gesture; however, 60 more were moved in to take their places. Some people, and it has not been determined whether some or all of them were actually "enemy combatants," have been there for two years without legal counsel and without a hearing by a court, judge, magistrate, hearing officer, or major league baseball commissioner. The government is so excited because it let ONE talk to a lawyer for a few minutes.

You probably read that the Supreme Court is taking up the question of whether the detention without any due process at all is legal. There's the government on one side and the detainees on the other. There is one U.S. citizen being held (not at Gitmo) who has filed suit and his case should be taken up by the Supreme Court, but there has been no ruling on whether the Court will review the Court of Appeals decision yet. There are a number of other interested parties, amici curiae or friends of the court in legal parlance, who are weighing in with their arguments for and against detention without hearings and without regard to the Geneva Convention or other laws.

I haven't read all of the briefs that were filed, but one piqued my curiosity enough to take a look. I have copied the summary of the argument (that;s part of the paperwork that was filed) as to why judicial review should be mandated by the Supreme Court in these cases and set it out below:

The principle that humanitarian norms apply to prisoners of war and others detained during armed conflicts has at last, following a long history of horrors in captivity, achieved near-universal acceptance. Most famously realized in the various Geneva Conventions negotiated in the wake of the two world wars, these norms confer upon detainees both substantive rights and the right to a judicial determination of their proper status, thereby providing a predictable level of protection to those who are among the most vulnerable of the victims of war.

The United States has ratified the Geneva Conventions, expressly incorporated them into its written military regulations, and adhered to them in prior conflicts. Over the past half-century, moreover, the United States has played a prominent role in demanding that detainees be treated by foreign governments in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Recently, however, the United States’ treatment of detainees captured during the war on terrorism and its reluctance to reconcile its actions with the norms of the Geneva Conventions or submit them to the scrutiny of the courts, has resulted in widespread doubt about the United States’ actual commitment to those norms.

Genuine, demonstrated commitment to the principles of the Geneva Conventions is vital to the United States’ moral authority to demand compliance by other nations with those agreements. Contrary to the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion that the courts should not be involved in this process, development of this body of law requires rather than excludes a judicial role. Even where executive discretion is broadest, the fact of review is a formidable protection. And there is law to apply here: impartial tribunals are particularly well-suited to determine whether the detentions at issue comply with the procedural and substantive guarantees that find expression in the Geneva Conventions, United States military regulations, and the United States Constitution.

Indeed, the Conventions and military regulations themselves expressly contemplate the involvement of competent tribunals in making these determinations. Even if the detainees’ claims are ultimately deemed to lack merit, independent judicial review would erase the suspicion of executive overreach and provide the international community with assurances that the United States’ detentions are not arbitrary or in derogation of the Geneva Conventions.

Just as significantly, judicial review will enable the courts of the United States to contribute to the long-term development and evolution of international humanitarian law by giving meaning to, and filling the interstices in, the governing rules. This, in turn, will lead to a mature and stable body of rules that can be predictably applied by, and demanded of, all nations in all future conflicts.

What left-wing, bleeding hearts penned these ideas and take this position opposing the government?

Former American Prisoners of War.

They have walked a mile in the shoes, so to speak. The death rate of American POW's in German prison camps in WWII was 1%. Germany was a signatory nation of the Geneva Convention, as was the U.S. The death rate in Japanese prison camps was 40%. Japan did not ratify the Geneva Convention. Did the Germans treat all their prisoners better than their Japanese counterparts? Hardly. Russia did not sign the Geneva Convention, and over 50% of Russian POW's died while in German custody.

The former American POW's are concerned about future conflicts and the reciprocal shoddy treatment of future American POW's on account of the legal debacle in Guantanamo Bay.

This travel hockey sucks big time. I’m here for the boys, but this is a fucking cult as bad as the fucking bloodsuckers. This team rep or manager or whatever you want to call her – she is worse than any Nazi, always demanding the boys’ papers. I have birth certificates, some kind of USA Hockey cards and papers, and photo ID’s supplied by the league that I have to carry around at all times, prepared to show them at every check point. One team we were playing – there I go with the “we,” I’m part of the cult –claimed that Sam was too young to be playing. Whatever it takes to win is okay, I guess. I thought I was done with that – whatever it takes to win.

I waited a couple days and got Frank Morton back in the office to talk about … well, … reality, I guess. I didn't know where to start, so I suggested that the vampire hunters wanted his help. And what if Morton was crazy? I'd be buying into his delusion, perpetuating that delusion. And I remembered the novel, Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut, and its moral: You are what you pretend to be, so be careful about what you pretend to be. I watched his face for his reaction.

A close-lipped smile came to his face, and he pointed out that he no longer had to go to see any shrink because I now believed that he was a vampire. He laughed out loud, but was quickly silent when I told him I wanted no more surprises like people claiming to be vampire hunters showing up in my office, taking up my time, trying to convince me that all the mumbo-jumbo about vampires was true.

Morton was alarmed. His eyes widened, and beads of sweat started to condense on his bald head. I’m sure that his pulse, if he even had one, was quickening. He claimed that Wallace was interested not in talking, but in having him killed. They were on a mission to exterminate Morton and “his kind.” He was animated, now, louder and more forceful. He was angry, not afraid. He shot up from the chair, pointing an index finger down at me from across my desk. He screamed that the vampire killers would kill him and would kill me to cover their tracks. He went on about how the stalkers and killers said that the vampires were guilty of human experimentation and genocide, but that they were on a campaign of mass extermination, mass murder, themselves.

He moved to the window and looked down upon Public Square. He stood there for several seconds, staring. Then he tapped the glass with the same index finger he had pointed at me, telling me that the bum sleeping on the bench forty, fifty years ago, would be dead. He snapped his sausage fingers, “Just like that. Swift, clean, neat. Who cared back then?” He chuckled, “Actually, who would care today? Nobody missed them then; nobody would miss them now. Darwinism -- survival of the fittest." He stopped. "Survival of the fittest," he said again, only this time, under his breath with a wistful look, as if he was somewhere in the past. He continued, more focused, palms on the window, fingers spread, saying that some would risk it today without fear of retribution.

He turned around to face me and said that it was very difficult to describe the feeling, the urge, the craving – that he was driven by it. He said, quite seriously, without emotion, that he could take me now, kill me, but that he was controlling the urge. He claimed that when the feeling rose within him, engulfed him, as he described it, he fought against it and did not kill. He said that he had a supply of human blood and that he slaked his thirst momentarily, but that the desire, the urge, only really subsided with the kill. He said that sometimes the feeling was overwhelming and all-consuming and that some of them gave in to it all the time -- take what nature condemned them to take, so to speak. He admitted to giving in to the urge every now and then, saying it casually, without remorse. He said that someone once likened the feelings they had to the urge to push that pregnant women have, and it was obvious that he was trying to recall the feeling at that point.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. He told me that I was in no danger and to relax, but the guy gave me the heebee–jeebees, and then he said that they had a right to try to survive in the world, just like everyone else.

The hunters and trackers were ruthless, he explained, likening them to wild, killing animals. I asked him if they were human. He shook his head and quietly said, “Hitler? He was human. Pol Pot? Human. Stalin? Harry Truman? All human. What humans do in the name of nationalism is a crime. What humans do to each other in the name of religion and their gods is a crime. What humans have done to each other over the course of history -- well, you know the answer to that question. These trackers and the killers are human, fanatics; and they base their mission, their ‘final solution,’ so to speak, on a false premise. They believe we all are evil creatures, wanting to kill off the human race.”

I tried to shake him. I tried at that point to flush him out. I should have bailed out at that point and ended the interview, sending him off to another lawyer. I think that if it was my money, my fee, I would have done that. Maybe not. I think that’s what I was saying before. Choices become apparent only after the outcome and cannot be divined at the time – we are carried along by the current unable to alter the course of our lives at any given moment. It is only afterwards that we say we should have done this or we could have done that, but in the end, we really had no opportunity at the time.

I said something like, “You’ve killed humans. And you get some kind of pleasure or a rush from that. Now, you take the position that you’re the victim. Doesn’t make a whole helluva lot of sense to me. You say it’s part of nature to kill humans, but that doesn’t excuse the killing. You are all role-playing.”

And he explained their philosophy, which, I guess when you think about it, is what people live by all the time by saying that they lived by our rules, one of which was that anybody could do anything as long as they didn’t get caught; and if they got caught, they would suffer the consequences. I suppose that’s what the Green River killer who just confessed to 48 murders did – he did what he wanted to do until he got caught; and if he didn’t get caught, he continued on his path.

Morton put his hand on my shoulder, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. He pointed out that life was a series of negotiations, and he hired me to make a deal, knowing that they wouldn’t keep their side of the bargain. He said that he knew that they were going to kill him.

"Josef Mengele," I said. "Is that true?"

He turned his head to look at me again, "Yes, that's true, if you want it to be true. He says that is who he is. He's a professor doing genetic research. He has an air of legitimacy about him, don't you think?"

Genetic research. Morton said that the man who claimed to be Mengele also claimed that he had been doing the same kind of research for more than a century, different places, different circumstances. He claimed to have been Gregor Mendel, a monk who did all the early work in genetics, the father of modern genetics.

I asked Morton why Mengele, or whoever he was, killed his wife, trying to address the matters directly at hand. I stood and joined him at the window, where we could see that the flags on the pole atop the Terminal Tower hung limply and that there was no trace of a cloud in the light blue sky. He whispered that he still enjoyed the weather after all the years he had been alive, that every day was different, and his eyes were brimming with tears. He blinked back the emotion and breathed deeply, telling me that he really did love his wife.

And I asked him again why the man who thought he was Mengele killed his wife. I waited. The whir from the air-conditioning vent filled the quiet. My thoughts drifted to something grounded in reality and the reason I originally took on Morton as a client. The murder charge. The alternative -- well, I didn't want to think about it. There was little to link Morton to the crime. All of the evidence was circumstantial. But circumstantial evidence could convict as well as eyewitness evidence. It was just a little easier to defend against. And here, the prosecution had very little to run with. Could the argument with his wife and the drug paraphernalia that could pass for equipment to drain a body of blood be enough for a jury to convict him? Possible, but highly unlikely. The police had moved too quickly in this one, and the county prosecutor was likely to offer some type of plea bargain. We would end up having a trial. And Court TV would be there. I looked at Frank Morton. He was interested in what was happening in the busy scene below. He felt my stare and looked me in the right eye. “Why did he kill your wife, Frank?" I asked again.

He said softly that they had certain philosophical differences, and I asked the follow-up question, “Over what?” The whir of the air conditioning stopped. A muffled voice invaded the silence as we stood side-by-side at the window, looking down over the Public Square panorama.

"The existence of our species," he said, teeth clenched.