Hundreds of known innocent men imprisoned at Guantanamo

As reported by the UK Times Online Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's Chief of Staff has confirmed that most of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo were innocent, and that the Bush Administration knew this. Most of them were taken into custody without ever having had their cases reviewed by a member of the U.S. military, and most of them were turned over to the U.S. by others in return for reward money ranging from $3,000 to $25,000:

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.” He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

Though many of the prisoners were immediately known to be innocent, the Bush Administration kept them imprisoned so as not to hurt its image as being tough on the "War on Terror." The innocence of almost all of these prisoners compounds the evidence that many of them were tortured and at least several of them were murdered while in U.S. custody. 759 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. Only about 35 of them will be prosecuted in federal or military courts. Fifty others will be "held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war."

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The dangerous prisoners of Guantanamo

How dangerous are the most dangerous prisoners of Guantanamo? If you listened to the Bush Administration, you'd think that they were all hardened killers. But guess what happens when a real-life judge looks only at the government's evidence regarding those the government hasn't released willingly? Glenn Greenwald reviews recent information from the Washington Post:

Federal judges, acting under a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling that grants Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to challenge their confinements, have ordered the government to free 32 prisoners and backed the detention of nine others. In their opinions, the judges have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants. Even when ruling for the government, the judges have not always endorsed the Justice Department's case. . . .
This, of course, is a national travesty. Considering only the government's evidence, judges have ordered the release of 32 out of 41 of the detainees. This is not an indication that the judges have been lenient; they are the same career federal judges who run the United States District Courts. Rather, these shocking statistics show that there is no meaningful evidence that most of the longest imprisoned detainees are guilty of anything at all. Consider also that the U.S. released most of the detainees a long time ago because even the U.S. admitted that it had no evidence of wrongdoing in most of these cases:
Since October 7, 2001, when the current war in Afghanistan began, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantánamo. Of these, approximately 420 have been released without charge. In January 2009, approximately 245 detainees remained. . . Of those still incarcerated, U.S. officials said they intend to eventually put 60 to 80 on trial and free the rest.
It's a beautiful system, isn't it? Imprison and vilify hundreds of innocent people, distributing their images to garner public support for a needless series of military occupations. More and more, I think of the U.S. as primarily a warmonger society. The evidence just keeps pouring in from every direction.

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Scalia’s thought process: “Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway.”

Way back in 1989, I happened to be watching Episode Two of a PBS series entitled "Ethics in America." It was a terrific 10-part series that considered compelling topics in ethics. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a participant in Episode Two. You can see all of the episodes, including Episode Two here (click on the little "VoD" button next to Episode 2). You might be wondering how I could possibly remember a particular comment from a particular episode from 20 years ago. I do remember: it was burned into my memory because it was so utterly bizarre. At about the 31-minute mark, the moderator (Charles Ogletree, Jr.) posed a hypothetical. What if you were an attorney and your client told you that he committed a murder a couple years ago? The clear answer is that the attorney-client privilege protects that admission; if you were that man's attorney, you could not tell anyone else what your client told you in the course of your consultation with him. Things got much more interesting, as the moderator elaborated on the hypothetical. Assume that your client tells you that after he committed the murder, the police erroneously arrested the wrong man. Further, assume that man has been found guilty by a jury and he is scheduled to be executed. As the attorney, what can you do to protect the life of an innocent man who is about to be executed for a crime committed by your own client who is confessing his guilt to you? This is a tough issue, right? At the moment where the moderator indicated that the innocent man was about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit, Justice Scalia spoke up: "Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway." You can see and hear this statement for yourself at 31:50 in the video. Although I'm certain that Justice Scalia would claim that his utterance was a "joke," (after all, other participants laughed), it makes you wonder, especially in light of a recent case decided by the United States Supreme Court, In re Davis.

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Why would an innocent person confess to a crime?

Today I read a 2005 Scientific American article that discussed why so many innocent people confessed to committing crimes.

The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing.

Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play . . . [One of those factors is the tendency] toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.

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Unofficial U.S. military strategy: Keep extra weapons around in case you kill innocent people

Several soldiers who have returned from combat zones talk with the American News Project about what they say is the widespread practice of using "drop weapons" to cover up the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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