Melissa Hoffer is one of those lawyers intentionally slandered in January by Charles Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, the subject of our next post. Hoffer, a Boston lawyer, represents six Guantanamo detainees. Read their story. Read her story.
This is a little known piece, at least to us. Just read it. It is chilling.
Read Hoffer’s description of how our “big friend”, John Howard’s masturbation mate, really goes about “doing its business”. See how the US really considers the rest of the world, including us. Understand the difference between this Administration’s values, in practice, and the values it claims it wants to export to the Middle East, like the rule of law, like liberty, like human rights, like human decency, like human dignity. Compare the claims of the US Defense Department and the Bush Administration (with the collusion of the Howard Government) about the treatment of prisoners, with the reality of what they do.
The U.S. position is that it may seize anyone, anywhere, at any time, if there is reason to believe that person is an “enemy combatant” someone who is part of or “supporting” (even unwittingly) Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or forces “associated” with these groups.
The global dragnet cast by this definition is so broad that an attorney for the U.S., arguing before Judge Green in December 2004, admitted it would include a little old lady from Switzerland who gave money to an Afghan charity organization that – unbeknownst to her – funneled the contribution to Al Qaeda.
And equally, it should be said, you and I could suffer the same fate.
Hoffer’s closing words in an (unavailable) speech:
“If we extinguish that humanity with lawlessness and cruelty, we extinguish hope for the future of humankind. For when we degrade others, we degrade ourselves, and when we take away a another person’s freedom without just cause, we erode our own freedom. But as we join with others around the world, working, fighting, unjust imprisonment and torture, we honor and preserve our humanity. This is the lesson of Guantanamo.”
According to Wikipedia:
“The six men were formally arrested by Bosnian authorities, tried before the Bosnian Supreme Court, and acquitted of all charges. Even so, upon their release from legitimate Bosnian incarceration, following their acquittal, they were captured by American security officials who transported them to detention and interrogation in the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conduct of the Bosnian authorities was formally condemned as illegal by the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia Herzegovina, the relevant Bosnian court at the time.
The Associated Press has made the Combatant Status Review Tribunals of four of the six men available for download. Transcripts within these documents record the Bosnians reporting to their tribunal officers that interrogators did not believe that there had ever been any substance to the US allegations that they had planned to bomb the US embassy.
And according to the Washington Post:
Since then, the military has conducted annual reviews of the six men’s status.
Each time, court officers have upheld the original decision.
Records from tribunal sessions in December 2005 show the U.S. military is no longer accusing the Algerians of conspiring to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. No explanation for the change is given.
The military has listed other factors in its decision to label the men a security threat.
One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers.
Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.
Boudella was accused by the U.S. military of joining bin Laden and Taliban fighters at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the mountain hideout where the al-Qaeda leadership escaped from U.S. forces in December 2001. In fact, at the time, Boudella was locked up thousands of miles away in Sarajevo, after his arrest in the later-discredited embassy plot.
One fresh allegation filed against Boudella last year was that he wore a ring “similar to those that identified the Red Rose Group members of Hamas,” the radical Palestinian movement, according to tribunal records.
Boudella’s wife, Nadja Dizdarevic, responded in an interview that the ring is a common anniversary band worn by thousands of Bosnian Muslims. She said she obtained an affidavit from the jeweler in Sarajevo where he bought the ring and submitted it to the U.S. military in hopes that they will drop the charge at his next hearing.
If it is a mark of belonging to Hamas, then 98 percent of the Bosnian Muslims belong to Hamas,” she said. “For every claim they make against him, I have proof to show them they are wrong, so they have to invent something new.”
The Defense Department declined to answer specific questions about the case, saying that some evidence against the men remains classified.
But a Pentagon spokesman defended the decision to apprehend the six Algerians.
“There was no mistake in originally detaining these individuals as enemy combatants,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. “Their detention was directly related to their combat activities as determined by an appropriate Defense Department official before they were ever transferred to Guantanamo.”
So be careful. You Are a Threat to US Security
The decision will not be made by a court of law, it will be made by “an appropriate Defense Department official” whatever that might be – you’ll never know or ever be able to find out – on the basis of unquestionable, unreviewable, “classified” information, which you will never be allowed to see. In fact, it is so secret that they can do what they like with no information whatever – because its existence cannot be tested – especially if to reverse a decision would be an embarrassment. There is no accountability whatever and that leads to the brazen corruption we see today at all levels of the Bush Administration.
This is American justice and American law at work under this illegitimate neo-con junta which is so beloved by John Howard and his toadying supporters in the coalition.
Who are the true cowards?
The cowards are not those who “do not have the stomach for the war” (as Cheney puts it when blaming the American people for his own failure); not those who publicly oppose, or privately work against, an illegal, unjust, unsupportable, unethical adventure predicated on deliberate lies by an unutterably stupid President and his unbelievably cruel, greedy and dishonest Vice-President.
The real cowards are those in the administration, the bureaucracy and the military who are too afraid to stand up against obvious, monstrous injustice; who would willingly sacrifice other people’s lives in order to protect themselves from embarrassment; who would sacrifice everything that is, or has been, good and great about their country for the sake of their own careers.
The real cowards are those ordinary people who, although they oppose the war and the excesses of the American, Australian and British governments, do not speak up; who say, “she’ll be right”.
The real cowards include those leaders of nations, like John Howard and Tony Blair, who go along with a madman for the sake of the hope of a little better trade deal, and so are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the destruction of the lives of millions more; who have participated in and even applauded the ruination of an entire country, the creation of a more dangerous world, a surge in terrorism and the destabilisation of the entire Middle East.
These are the real cowards. These are the real “evil-doers”.
