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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (95775)	1/16/2007 10:06:39 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361538

Justice a casualty of war Tuesday, January 16, 2007 A del Hassan Hamad -- detainee ISN 940 -- vanished inside Guantanamo more than three years ago. I don't claim to understand the heart of the Bush administration's case against him, much of which remains classified. I don't know when the definition of "enemy combatant" was expanded to include hospital administrators. Nor do I know if unfathomable malice or all-too-familiar incompetence best explains why, 54 months after he was pulled from his bed in Pakistan, Hamad has yet to be formally charged with a crime. But I believe those questions -- and the administration's concept of justice -- became more relevant last week when a deputy secretary of defense suggested corporate America should blacklist the law firms who are "representing terrorists" at Guantanamo Bay. As President Bush and a cowed Congress have ripped habeas corpus -- now, there's a stand guaranteed to promote democracy -- from the Constitution, you might think the administration has already completed the arrangements necessary to be judge, jury and (in due time) executioner of the 445 detainees still imprisoned at Guantanamo. As long as there's a "war against terrorism," Adel Hamad -- who denies any sympathy for al-Qaida -- has no right to a lawyer or to face his accusers. He is not allowed to hear the charges against him or to ask a federal judge to review their merits. But that's not enough of a legal advantage for Charles Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs. Stimson said the list of law firms that are providing counsel to some detainees is "shocking." "I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms," Stimson said. One of those "firms" is the federal public defender's office in Portland, which is representing Hamad and six other detainees. Hamad's case has also attracted the attention of David Naimon, Laura Moulton and Ben Parzybok, three Portlanders who have set up a Web site -- www.projecthamad.org -- designed to publicize the dilemma of detainees who have been condemned as terrorists without the benefit of judicial review. "We focused on Hamad because the evidence against him seemed particularly weak," Naimon said. "The definition of 'enemy combatant' has obviously been expanded if you can arrest someone not on the battlefield who's never been accused of holding belligerent beliefs." Hamad has been accused, instead, of working for two nongovernment organizations, as a teacher and administrator, with links to al-Qaida and coming into contact "with persons who had positions of responsibility in al-Qaida." A military tribunal voted 2-1 that Hamad was properly classified as an enemy combatant, given what one military lawyer called "the low evidentiary hurdle." But the dissenting tribunal member, an Army major whose name was redacted, argued that this logic would require that "a local merchant who 'came in contact' with al-Qaida members could be deemed an enemy combatant." In the absence of any allegations that Hamad "directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces," the major added, the tribunal's decision would "provide for unconscionable results": locking up all physicians, nurses and aid workers who worked in any hospital with an alleged terrorist connection. When the war in Iraq is lost and the war against terrorism is stalled, that may be as close as the administration gets to a winning strategy.