fair trial

As Obama appointees were congratulating themselves for going after those eight Iranians, a US District Court Judge in Washington, DC, was dismissing a lawsuit filed against Rumsfeld and two dozen other US officials by the families of two Guantanamo detainees who, along with another prisoner, committed suicide at the detention center in 2006, , according to the government’s official account.

Judge Ellen Huevelle noted in her opinion that there was compelling evidence the detainees were murdered. But last year the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the "detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement" of "enemy combatants."

Moreover, in court papers filed in June 2009, the Obama administration said, "Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to 'embarrassment of our government abroad.'"

... Judge Huevelle ultimately agreed to dismiss the case.

“The United States is strongly committed to the promotion of human rights around the world, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the White House said in an accompanying news release. “As the President noted in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, human rights are a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity for the United States.”

... Yet, President Obama has taken no action against US officials who under the direction of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld imprisoned without charge “war on terror” detainees at secret black sites and at Guantanamo Bay.

These prisoners also were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process. They, too, were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members.

President Obama has excused his failure to exact any accountability on complicit US officials by saying that he preferred “to look forward, not backwards.” It is apparently easier to look backwards in Iran and demand accountability than it is in Washington.

[After 9-11], Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’.

...Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida.

We remain extremely concerned about the impact of control orders on the subject of the orders, their families and their communities. There can be no doubt that the degree of control over the minutiae of controlees' daily lives, together with the length of time spent living under such restrictions and their apparently indefinite duration, have combined to exact a heavy price on the mental health of those subjected to control orders. The severe impact on the female partners and children of the controlees, including on their enjoyment of their basic economic and social rights as well as their right to family life, is an example of the "collateral impact" of counter-terrorism measures recently identified by the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism...

We are particularly concerned about the apparent increase in resort to conditions in control orders which amount to internal exile, banishing an individual and, effectively, his family, from his and their community. We have very grave reservations about the use of such historically despotic executive orders, and the contribution they undoubtedly make to "the folklore of injustice."