I tend to be comfortable within the wide range of issues that I've written about, and don't venture out into different issues. One of them would be Guantanamo, and what I know of it is largely from newspapers, and the fact that Guantanamo was supposed to be closed, but it wasn't. I was asked by a friend of mine to write about Guantanamo detainees, and I will do so.
He asked me to pass on this petition, and I've posted a small excerpt from it here below:
Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti citizen, has been a detainee in Guantanamo since 2002 after being captured by Pakistani forces and sold into US custody. Despite over 400 interrogations, suffering through endless hours of torture, including but not limited to beatings, sleep deprivation, threats and forced stress positions, the US government has failed to gather any of the coveted information that this treatment was ostensibly designed to garner. Furthermore, the US government has not produced any evidence against Fayiz al-Kandari aside from hearsay accusations of other Guantanamo prisoners and unidentified Afghanis, evidence which, under any other circumstances, would not be allowed in court.
I make no judgment about the validity of this case, as I do not know enough about it. But, what I will discuss is the issue of Guantanamo and detainees there. I believe that military commissions are not a sufficient recourse for prosecuting these detainees, and that they should be prosecuted in federal court instead. I mostly agree with the recommendations of the Human Rights Watch to then President-Elect President Obama.
Also, what went unremarked by the mainstream media that likes to "concern troll" about detainees being tried outside of military commissions, was the fact that one of these Guantanamo detainees was prosecuted in U.S. Federal Court. There wasn't a peep, and nothing really bad (or cataclysmic) happened as a result. Here's the story on this about how Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was prosecuted in court:
"Trying Ghailani in US federal court rather than before a flawed, ad hoc military commission was the smart as well as the lawful thing to do," said Joanne Mariner, counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. "This case sets the stage for moving the 9/11 trial to a civilian court, too."
Human Rights Watch monitored proceedings in the Ghailani trial, as it has with military commission proceedings and selected federal court trials of terrorism suspects. None of the security concerns raised by opponents of civilian trials came to fruition in Ghailani's trial - most New Yorkers were probably not even aware that the trial was taking place, Human Right Watch said.
Our legal process works, and is capable of handling terrorists like Ghailani. There is no reason to think otherwise unless one believes that we do not have the right to prosecute these terrorists in U.S. Federal Court. Hopefully this will be how the trial for the 9/11 terrorists is handled. If the right-wing tut-tuts and screeches about this, we can point to Ghailani's case, and say that our courts were strong enough, and more than capable of handling a terrorist like Ghailani.