More on the Military Lawyers and the Detainees

When he speaks publicly, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, a military lawyer for a Guantánamo detainee, is careful to say his remarks do not reflect the views of the Pentagon.

As if anybody would make that mistake.

In his Navy blues, the youthful commander could pass for an eager cadet. But give him a minute on the subject of his client, a terrorism suspect named Omar Khadr, and he sounds like some 1960s radical lawyer, an apple-cheeked William Kunstler in uniform.

The Bush administration’s war crimes system “is designed to get criminal convictions” with “no real evidence,” Commander Kuebler says. Or he lets fly that military prosecutors “launder evidence derived from torture.”

“You put the whole package together and it stinks,” he said in an interview.

And this is especially good to read. Cmdr. Kuebler is not a flaming liberal. He's an Evangelical Christian and actually very conservative, the kind of conservative - and the kind of Christian - that we need more of:

However scrappy he may appear, Commander Kuebler does not claim the typical lawyer’s zest for a fight for its own sake. Instead, he said, his faith and his work are intertwined.

“It is a powerful way to be a witness for Christ,” he said, “by demonstrating your capacity to not judge the way everybody else is judging and to serve unconditionally.”

Read "An Unlikely Antagonist in the Detainees' Corner" in today's NYT to get the whole story. I'm proud and heartened that there are military officers who support the rule of law and the ideals on which this country was founded.

RFSJ

"I guess you can call it torture"

KABUL, Afghanistan — American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.

This is from the second of a five-part series that McClatchy News Bureau has put together after its 8-month investigation into detainee and prisoner abuse. (It's being run in the Trenton Star-Ledger, among other papers.) Yesterday's topic was We Got the Wrong Guys and details how the majority of the detainees at Guantanamo are not "the worst of the worst" by any strentch of the imagination. Topics later in the week include A School for Jihad, "Due Process is Legal Mumbo-Jumbo" and "You are the king of this prison."

I'm embarassed for the country that we have done these things. But it's important to name them so they can be corrected and so they can never happen again. As one who believes all people are created in God's image and likeness, I ackowledge that all people are of equal value in God's eyes no matter what their religion or nationality or race or sexual orientation for that matter. Therefore, any time we treat anyone with less then the dignity that every human being deserves, and which we promise to do in the Bapitsmal Covenant, it's not only a breach of the laws of the United States, it might well be a sin as well. Last week's Supreme Court decision affirming that the Gitmo detainess have the right of habeus corpus in Federal court is a good first step.

RFSJ

Bush Rebuked on Gitmo Detainees' Rights

Flash from the NYT:

WASHINGTON — Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

I've got to go read the entire article and at least the syllabus (summary) of the decision, but this looks really good. All people, not just those who happen to be born under the American Flag, should have the same legals rights, no matter who they are or what they might have done. This goes a long way to redressing a shameful statement the Bush Administration made, that some people have no rights at all. That is un-American, and un-Christian to boot.

RFSJ