Still, I would prefer Gitmo to be treated as US soil (as it should be) with all the legal rights for prisoners that that entails.

By the same token, what does this do for John McSame’s status as a natiral born American born in the Panama Canal Zone?

However, there will always be a Jon Yoo surrogate to provide a legal opinion.

16 – Torture by the USG is torture by the USG, wherever it took place. The distinction of having taken place on US soil at Gitmo as opposed to taking place in a black site is, to my eyes, irrelevant.

The relevance has less to do with his trial at GITMO, as it does with the ramifications of the the testimony and evidence and, secondarily, the ability to even get to evidence that has not been destroyed or compel testimony from witnesses.

With respect to using “tortured” or “coerced” testimony at the trials, the first issue is how do you know (know in the evidentiary sense as a court – not in the ‘we all know’ sense) the statements resulted from torture? Well, for the blacksites, lotsaluck getting records and evidence. Apparently freezing a man bound in ’stress positions’ to death “for interrogation purposes” doesn’t even get a looksee by Congress (despite Priest’s public reporting), so who, exactly, has been making sure that records of treatment are available? DOJ has been busy making sure CIA destroys evidence – not too concerned with procution and preservation.

OTOH, with respect to Qhatani, there are a lot of people and records that can be obtained. So therein lies the big difference with respect to his trial, imo.

There is another round of issues too. Because the Qhatani ‘interrogation’ records are even more fleshed out and preserved than the Padilla ones (with DOJ never making any lit hold effort to preserve any of the information from the Pentagon review of abuses of Padilla and the other detainee in the So Car Brig) and because they are pretty on their face horrible, a trial of Qhatani puts him in his absolute strongest position to get clean and clear access to the “classified” depravity information of his interrogations and put that into evidence. Or, if Gov wants it kept out of evidence (and they do) they would have to do something military courts analogous what Comey did in el-Masri’s suit and file to keep it out as state secrets, but then they would seemingly have to drop charges (at least, in the fairy tale world where DOJ makes some minor attempt to follow the law or courts boot them in the backside and make them).

So if they keep the interrogation evidence out using state secrets, the charges may have to be dropped. If they allow the evidence in – - then that’s where the US jurisdiction becomes a larger looming issue.

Once there is evidence in about the interrogations, then the Torture Conventions and War Crimes Act come into play, at least the Torture Victims Act in a civil recovery sense and – if you had non-corrupt prosecutors, then the criminal provisions. And while Eisentrager has indicated that the US court has no jurisdiction actions taken by the USG on certain foreign sites, Rasul both calls Eisentrager into question and, in any event, specifically finds that GITMO is subject to US courts’ jurisdiction. So habeas notwithstanding (and a habeas case based on actual torture in the record and actual military conviction obtained using such actual torture is not one of the cases DOJ would pick to defend as a constitutional habeas challenge) a US court would have jurisdicion over the torturers and assaulters and abusers and coercers – - and their co-conspirators – - with respect to actions taken at GITMO.

All fwiw, bc with what DOJ has done to law and justice over the last 8 years, it’s not likely that any of it matters anymore.

Which gets back to my original question, on what grounds is BushCo claiming the right to continue holding Al-Qahtani if they have dropped the charges against him? What new fiction have they created to assert their right to hold him?

Coupling this question with others’ comments about the fate of detainees released to places like Saudi Arabia, I have been viciously attacked by this proposed piece of Bushworld Logic [sic]:

“Don’t you see? We have to imprison and torture them over here here so that they won’t be imprisoned/tortured/killed over there!”

A longer version is running through my mind, but I don’t even want to put it in words. I’m only tossing this out here so that if/when the BushJunta makes a similar announcement, I can say “Oh, FORK! I predicted it, but I was trying to be IRONIC!!!”

FunnyD
I promise to try to get through the rest of the comments before chiming in again.

You can only be free if I am free.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom.

and perhaps this one is my favorite:

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

~Clarence Darrow

Seemed appropriate for this thread.

Certainly the lawyer wants to see the grounds for continuing to hold his client. He wants to know if the other defendants know anything. Now that he has something to offer them, they might be more willing to talk.