Obama’s New Plan To Hide Torture Evidence

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

This just posted by the New York Times:

Obama Weighs Plan Allowing 9/11 Suspects to Plead Guilty

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

There is more to this…

The main reason for this new “tactic” by the Obama administration is obvious; do not allow testimony to go on the public record of how the United States tortured prisoners.  But, is that all?  Not in my eyes.  

We must study the logic used to justify this new tactic.  If we allow the prisoners to plead guilty without a trial, for which five of these prisoners means a death sentence, then we keep these people from becoming martyrs by dying… ummmm… are you lost yet?  So am I.  If these detainees are executed, regardless of how, or under what circumstance, they will be martyr’s regardless.  This flawed logic alone leads us to believe that it is all about keeping the testimony of how we tortured from becoming public record.

David Glazier, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has written about the commission system, said: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.”

I disagree with Mr. Glazier.  The number of prisoners that could face the death sentence still at Guantanamo is but a fraction of the total number.  The rest still have to be charged with a crime, tried, and convicted of something, or, we must merely release them.  So, taking judicial shortcuts to execute five prisoners does not “get rid of the problem.”  In fact, as Mr. Glazier points out, it creates an entirely new, and worse, problem for the Obama administration; the execution of prisoners while withholding evidence or testimony of torture, which internationally will be seen as merely a kangaroo court conviction no different than you find in countries run by a dictator.

President Obama has already shown he can, and will, reverse himself when it comes to campaign promises, and, those broken promises are going to haunt him in 2012.  At this point, it becomes a matter of how to minimize the damage.

Operating a government of transparency is gone.  President Obama has broken that promise.  In fact, by campaigning against secrecy only to further the Bush administration’s claims President Obama knows there is no “walking back” this betrayal.

Ending torture is all well and good, but, refusing to prosecute those who committed, those who authorized, and those who colluded to commit torture is something he simply cannot “walk back.”  Yes, it means that come 2012 there will be an enormous pie-fight where Republicans tout Obama’s refusal to uphold the law while Obama touts how it was the Republicans who broke the law to begin with, but, in the end, it will merely make voters stay home.  That advantage goes to the Republican Party and everyone knows it since some of the states and many of the districts that went Democratic have a majority of voters registered Republican.

Closing Guantanamo while not prosecuting torture, or, allowing more evidence of torture to come out, that is the problem.  Our politicians are moving to keep the detainees from being transferred to the United States while Europe will not take detainees if we won’t.  Keeping Guantanamo open isn’t an option anymore.  So, what to do?  Imagine the impact on detainees who have been told that they will never be released, no matter what, and the best option they have is to plead guilty, accept the consequences of the court, and count themselves lucky they weren’t executed.

The end-game of this new tactic becomes clear; get a conviction, no matter how it is done, then ask the host country to merely incarcerate the prisoner in their prisons.  Without a conviction, the host countries have no obligation to the United States to do anything with these detainees.

Is there a gamble here by the Obama administration?  Sure.  It’s that almost every detainee would rather be convicted of a crime, whether they committed one or not, in order to leave Guantanamo, and, like Hicks from Australia, go spend some time in a prison in your own country before you get released.  So, what happens to the detainees that refuse?  I’m more than willing to bet that they will be reminded that they too can commit “suicide”.  As for the prosecution and defense attorney’s, they both will have “no choice” but to “accept” the detainees plea deals.

Will President Obama “rescue” our nation’s reputation with the international community?  No.  In fact, this sham will be exposed for what it will have become — merely a kangaroo court that got detainees to plead to anything to leave.  But, that is better to Obama than the alternative he will face domestically if he breaks his promise to close Guantanamo since he’ll seek re-election in 2012.

Thus, we come to my conclusion.  This isn’t just about keeping our torture from becoming further public record, or, merely executing five detainees.  It’s about how to fulfill a campaign promise with the least legal “fuss”, and thus political “fuss”, he can so that come 2012, he can say, “see, I closed Guantanamo!”