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Would you want these Guantanamo suspects living next door?
Osama blocks Khalid Sheik Mohammed's shot at 72 virgins
Khadr shows Guantanamo 'legal aid' is among the best
The new jihadi menu – eat your kill
The two faces of Human Rights Watch
Guantanamo pullout is a defeat of sense by sensibility
Guantanamo shows no signs of closure
The new, inmate-friendly Guantanamo
Suddenly Obama has Muslim roots
'Terrorist court' plan shows a new Obama emerging
Scroll down for:
Would you want these Guantanamo suspects living next door?
Would you want these Guantanamo suspects living next door?
Osama blocks Khalid Sheik Mohammed's shot at 72 virgins
Khadr shows Guantanamo 'legal aid' is among the best
The new jihadi menu – eat your kill
The two faces of Human Rights Watch
Guantanamo pullout is a defeat of sense by sensibility
Guantanamo shows no signs of closure
The new, inmate-friendly Guantanamo
Suddenly Obama has Muslim roots
'Terrorist court' plan shows a new Obama emerging
Steven Edwards: Would you want these Guantanamo suspects living next door?
Full Comment
The latest way to seek an immigration pass into Canada appears to go like this: Act suspiciously like a terrorist or even become one; spend a few years at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; get your name on a refugee-status claim form for review by Canadian immigration officials based in Jamaica – and you're in.Canadian church groups and others have filed to "sponsor" five Guantanamo Bay detainees for immigration to Canada as refugees.
Three Uyghur separatists of China are among the group. The U.S. has formally cleared them of having terrorism intentions -- against the West, at least. An Algerian and a Syrian -- the latter the Canadian sponsors made public just this week -- are the others. Interpretations of their backgrounds vary according to who is making them.
What should the average Canadian make of this?
Generally, the anti-Guantanamo crowd has argued many -- if not a majority -- of those who've passed through or remain at the detention camps fell into U.S. custody because they were in the "wrong place at the wrong time."
One such case of "mistaken identity" was that of Ugandan-born Jamal "Tony" Kiyemba. He spent his teen years in London before becoming a pharmacy student at a university in Leicester. He decided in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks that Pakistan would be a good place to visit to "study Arabic and the Koran." Following his arrival, his "vacation" took him to the Afghan-Pakistan border, where Pakistani forces nabbed him. In exchange for a "bounty" the Americans were paying for terror suspects, the Pakistanis gave him up to U.S. forces, who eventually transferred him to Guantanamo.
What terrible bad luck when you're only trying to get a bit of R and R - with a view of Tora Bora.
The U.S. released Kiyemba in 2006 without ever having charged him with anything. To many on the left, that's proof of his total innocence. Yet Britain refused to take him back because of security concerns, and it's believed he is now kicking his heels back in Uganda.
Oh how Britain was criticized in a string of media reports in which Kiyemba proclaimed his benign intentions regarding his far eastern excursion. After all, what's odd about quitting a university campus in the British Midlands to learn Arabic and study the Koran in Urdu-speaking Pakistan -- as war raged in the region?
Cynics might wonder why he couldn't find a Koran-study class a bit closer to home -- like on one of the numerous British Midlands street corners with a mosque. And as for a claim he made that Pakistan was a "very cheap" place to study -- how can you get cheaper than welfare-infused Britain, where anyone who's determined to remain bone idle can live off the state all their life?
One of the advantages the left has when pushing cases like those of the would-be Canadian-bound detainees is that public knowledge of the infamous side of Guantanamo's reputation is far more widespread than that of its utility as a tool to hold terror suspects.
Few would now deny the Bush administration committed excesses by Western standards in search for intelligence in 9/11's aftermath - especially in the early days when the fear of follow-up attacks was acute.
But the reality is that, since Guantanamo opened in 2002, the United States has released more than two-thirds of the 779 people it has detained there.
So there has been a massive thinning.
Of the 242 who remain, about 60 are slated for release, or transfer under some sort of continued supervision deal with a receiving country.
Matthew Waxman is among scholars of Guantanamo's human flows who concludes the number of mistaken-identity cases still there is "likely to be quite small."
In other words, most of those who remain may not be your ideal choice of neighbour.
"There are a number of detainees [remaining] who have been approved for release because they were found not to qualify technically as enemy combatants . but that's not to say they [didn't receive] training or [haven't] participated in al Qaeda-related activities," Waxman, author of Closing Guantanamo Is Way Harder Than You Think, which recently posted at ForeignPolicy.com, said during a Council on Foreign Relations briefing last week.
"So that brings you to the second category of individuals who are deemed not so dangerous that the United States feels the need to continue to detain them, but continue to pose some residual risk."
The three Canadian-sponsored Uyghurs are among 17 held at Guantanamo who appear to be an exception. Yet the United States has been unsuccessful with requests to more than 100 countries to take them, U.S. Navy Cmdr. J. D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, told me.
Washington has been unable to return them to China because that country considers them terrorists and is likely to subject them to torture or other abuse.
So shouldn't the three Uyghurs, at least, enter Canada?
I reported last week that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has "no plans" to issue special fast-track entrance permits to the trio.
This would seem folly because taking the apparently harmless Uyghurs is surely an ideal way to display a willingness to cooperate with President Barack Obama - as he seeks to fulfill a pledge to close the detention camps within a year - and not take on a significant security risk.
Yet Canada must also be concerned about any "thickening" of controls at the border with the United States, over which almost 80% of all Canadian exports pass.
While the Obama administration may express appreciation to Canada for helping him out with the Uyghurs, certain folks in Congress -- or certain guests on the likes of Fox television news -- may misinterpret such a gesture.
That is to say, Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't want to give any reason for anyone to allege that Canada is soft on security.
It's not an idle consideration: after 9/11 the misperception persisted for the longest time that the terrorists had entered the United States through Canada.
Canada's then ambassador to the UN, Paul Heinbecker, even wined and dined (well, lunched, actually) a number of key U.S. media representatives in a bid to set the record straight.
In August 2005, Frank McKenna, then Canadian ambassador to the United States, wrote to Fox TV hosts Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes to stress Canada's anti-terrorism efforts after then U.S. Representative J.D. Hayworth Jr. of Arizona stated on their show that "Canadians now basically let anyone into their country."
There's an additional concern within the Conservative government that letting in even the Uyghurs could be the thin edge of the sword.
"We're worried that those backing entry to Canada for the Uyghurs would try to use any success in that endeavour to press for entry of detainees Canada considers far more dangerous, such as those with a history of ties to the al Qaeda network," one government official told me.
With Kenney having ruled out their entry on a "political" pass, the three Uyghurs must wait for a decision by Canada's immigration bureaucrats in Jamaica -- the nearest office to Guantanamo -- who are assessing their claims in light of Canadian immigration law for refugees.
While the government has the power to override the system to rule in favour of admittance, it can't negatively influence the claim.
Likewise for the two other Guantanamo detainees backed by the Canadian sponsoring groups. Both Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian who lived in Montreal from 1995 to 2000, and Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, a Syrian Kurd, have been detained at Guantanamo since 2002.
Canada refused Ameziane's application for refugee status in 2000, leading him to travel to Afghanistan as "one of the few countries he could enter without a visa," says a profile of the 41-year-old issued by the Canadian Council for Refugees.
His U.S. Combatant Status Review Board report offers a different account, saying a Tunisian man paid him up to $1,500 and "encouraged him to travel to Afghanistan." Once there, he allegedly stayed at a terrorist "guesthouse."
The refugee council's profile of Mouhammad says he was living in Kabul, the Afghan capital, at the time of the U.S.-led invasion of that country. He had left Syria for Afghanistan to "look for work and in order to find a wife," says the profile.
He apparently "could not afford the price of a dowry in Syria."
Because "dowry" is the money a woman brings to her new husband, the profile writer was perhaps meaning to say "bride price" or "dower," both of which the groom pays.
In any event, surely the cost of travel to Afghanistan, and setting up home there, would have been more than enough to placate the average Syrian in-laws or their daughter - depending on which payment we're talking about.
Anyway, despite Mouhammad's mission in Afghanistan being primarily one of love (according to the refugee council profile), we're next told he and three fellow Syrians fled to Pakistan as the American-led forces approached.
They skipped, the profile explains, out of "fear of being targeted as foreigners."
Mouhammad's U.S. Combatant Status Review Board report says he operated a "safe house" where "5-20 personnel armed with AK-47 rifles could be found at any given time."
The U.S. authorities' accounts for both men are of course handicapped for having been produced by a system human rights groups say employed coercive interrogation techniques.
But are the refugee council's profiles of the men believable? Think about it. One or both of these fellows could one day be living next door to you.
National Post
Sun Feb 15 2009
Steven Edwards is Canwest News Correspondent in New York
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: Osama blocks Khalid Sheik Mohammed's shot at 72 virgins
Full Comment
It must be torture for a true jihadist to commit to becoming a martyr - then see your boss insist your life be saved.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed appeared to be quite the obliging enemy when he told a military judge in Guantanamo Bay in June 2008 that he seeks execution.
"Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time," the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks said as the judge pondered his request to represent himself. "I will, God willing, have this, by you."
Then along comes al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in a new taped message Thursday, warning the Americans they must spare the lives of the "warrior hero" Mohammed and four other accused co-conspirators.
If Osama gets his way, those 72 virgins martyrs are promised in paradise will just have to wait.
The other bizarre aspect of the new bin Laden tape was his threat that al-Qaida will kill any Americans it snags if the United States imposes the death penalty on the 9/11 five following convictions.
"The day America will have taken such a decision, it will have taken a decision to execute whomever we capture," said bin Laden.
But what American has al-Qaida ever released alive to this point? In the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter al-Qaida kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, the terror group even sent the U.S. State Department a videotape of his beheading. Mohammed admitted after U.S. forces captured him in Pakistan in 2003 that he had personally decapitated Pearl with his "blessed right hand."
"It's the height of absurdity for anyone associated with al-Qaida to even suggest that now, at long last, they're going to start treating captives badly," Reuters quoted an unnamed U.S. counterterrorism official as saying.
But it is perhaps significant that bin Laden saw fit to deride Barack Obama, the U.S. president, saying he was "following in the footsteps of" former President George W. Bush.
One analyst cited by Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab network that broadcast the tape, said it indicates the message has a dual meaning.
"Osama bin Laden believes that the euphoria which erupted in most of the Arab countries, Muslim countries, after the Obama election now is eroding, is disappearing," said Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper.
"Obama is not really as popular as he used to be when he was elected. So Osama sees the opportunity to say to the Muslim world: 'Obama is actually not going to deliver what you expect him to deliver; the peace process is completely dead; Jerusalem is boiling; al-Aqsa mosque is under threat of Israeli demolition - now the only way to treat Americans is the way we treated them on 11 September'."
If the hidden message really is that Obama has seen the sense in resuming the war on terror launched under the Bush administration, then America's most wanted man paid the U.S. president a huge compliment.
Now let's see Obama renounce the "Overseas Contingency Operation" phrase his administration invented to replace the far more accurate "war on terror" moniker.
National Post
Fri Mar 26 2010
© 2010 Postmedia Network Inc
If it's not the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for Pentagon-appointed attorneys, civilian attorneys offer themselves pro bono - whether they be opposed on principle to the Guantanamo tribunals, or attracted to the high-profile, historically significant cases for less selfless reasons.
Lawyers are plentiful even for terror suspects who say they don't want them - like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka KSM) and his four accused co-conspirators in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Twenty-six lawyers sat at the defendant-attorney benches last Thursday during the first hearing for the 9/11-five under the Obama administration. An invited father of a 9/11 victim made the count, expressing disbelief.
The attorney-turnout was on a day, even, that only three of the alleged terror group showed up - and one of them decided to leave early. The lawyer for Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi later charged the terror suspect had been "tricked" into leaving his cell with a false promise he'd be allowed to address the court - but the judge said there had been a miscommunication.
As al Hawsawi left the courtroom, a guard rushed to retrieve the cushion he'd been sitting on. It was presumably needed for use in the van that took the accused co-financier of the 9/11 hijackers back to his cell. KSM, the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind, complained on the eve of Barack Obama's January inauguration as president about the lack of cushions in the vans used to deliver him to court.
As last Thursday wore on, Walid bin Attash, one of the two remaining 9/11 defendants in the courtroom, showed his contempt for the proceedings by making a paper airplane, and tossing towards his accused cohort, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. But it floated to the floor, where one of the 9/11 lawyers picked it up, and placed it on Aziz Ali's bench. All in a day's representation, one imagines.
The plane had contained a message written by Bin Attash, whose charge sheet says he helped to select and train several of the 9/11 hijackers, was Osama bin Laden's body guard, and helped to prepare the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2000 bombing of USS Cole. But whatever the note said, Aziz Ali, the accused main moneyman of the 9/11 operation, never bothered to read it during the court proceeding.
It was at a separate hearing that Khadr, accused in the death of a U.S. soldier, picked a civilian as his new lead "court" attorney.
This follows his bid to dump his entire Pentagon-appointed team last month.
Barry Coburn of Washington has 28 years of experience as a criminal defence lawyer, and is listed by Super Lawyers magazine as having "attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement." So he's no slouch.
Khadr, 15 when U.S. forces snatched him from an Afghan battlefield in 2002, said his military team had been squabbling too much. He burst into tears in March, so fierce were their recriminations of one another as each vied to convince him that their respective plan for his case was the best one.
But that group had been the second team he's ordered fired. He gave most of the first one the push almost three years ago as he declared he planned to boycott proceedings. The Pentagon dutifully provided him with more lawyers.
Far from receiving too little representation, the indigent terror suspects at the U.S. navy base in Cuba may have access to too much.
Khadr began this year with three Pentagon-appointed military lawyers, two Pentagon-paid civilian lawyers, a military legal assistant, and two prominent Canadian human rights lawyers.
When he fired team members almost three years ago, the group had included a Pentagon-appointed lawyer with the Marine Corps, two Washington law professors and another Washington lawyer. There was a bid to bring on Gerry Spence, who came to fame in 1979 by winning a massive settlement for the family of Karen Silkwood - the nuclear plant worker whose story is told in the 1983 film "Silkwood." There were even thoughts of getting the Irish rock star Bono involved.
Compare all that to the options available to a regular penniless accused-perp in the United States. In many state systems, such folks are likely to be assigned a single case-burdened public defender, who may or may not be any good.
To be fair, the row that split the second team Khadr fired was well beyond his control or influence.
Even the chief of the Pentagon's Guantanamo defence office was involved in the squabbling, which has seen the protagonists of each side in the fight file ethics complaints against one another.
The new civilian lawyer emerged after Khadr spent the last month conferring with this two Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney and Nathan Whitling, who continue to work on his case pro bono, and appear to have made many personal, as well as professional sacrifices on his behalf. Also involved was navy Lt. Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, Khadr's pick as the single military lawyer the judge said last month he needed to retain under the military commission rules.
The tenacity of the Pentagon's "detailed" lawyers long ago dispelled any claims they were just government lackeys toeing the line of a process that would inevitably lead to conviction for the accused.
For instance, the military-led team that represented Osama bin Laden's one-time driver, Salem Ahmed Hamdan, famously brought down the whole military commission system in 2006 with its U.S. Supreme Court victory checking former President George W. Bush's power. It took an act of Congress to recreate the commissions.
Now the Obama administration is moving to amend the commission rules after a campaigning Barack Obama agreed with critics who said they fall short of providing defendants all the protections given in U.S. civilian and traditional military courts.
One of five changes already made public gives terror suspects the power to personally pick their military representation as long as the person they are choosing is "reasonably available."
Lack of clarity are the watchwords for the rest of the process as prosecutors scramble to keep up with rules changes in the preparation of cases, 66 of which are already on line.
"We are preparing these cases every day. We are ready to move forward, but we take our guidance from the president," navy Capt. John Murphy, chief prosecutor, told reporters in Guantanamo this week.
Translation: the task of case preparation has become akin to trying to hit a moving target. On the defence side, however, they seem to have all the manpower they need.
- Steven Edwards has visited Guantanamo Bay many times to cover the military commissions as a correspondent with Canwest News Service.
photo: Omar Khadr sits with his defense team during a hearing inside the court for the U.S. war crimes commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jul. 15, 2009. (Janet Hamlin/AFP/Getty Images)
Sun Jul 19 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
The jihadist leading the exchange even said that, in a bid to instill fear into U.S. servicemen, Americans should be told Muslim fighters "smack their lips to eat the flesh of ... the eaters of hamburgers and Pepsi."
The chilling message refers to parts of a recently published book by Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who is best known as the spiritual mentor of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the first al Qaeda leader in Iraq, whom U.S. forces killed in 2006. In one section of the work, Maqdisi discusses the idea of having to do something that is otherwise forbidden, like "murder or eating food sacrificed for an idol," according Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group, which translates jihadist "chat" sites.
Maqdisi adds some scholars believe this has evolved to mean that Muslims, faced with hunger, are allowed to kill an enemy and "cannibalize him." Some jihadist respondents made light of the entry, which appeared on the al-Fallujah forum June 12. "If we are forced to eat Americans, we will make them [into] kabsa," said one, referring to a family of rice dishes served mainly in Saudi Arabia. It would have "the taste of gunpowder," the contributor added, before also saying the "limbs of apostates" could be turned into appetizers.
Another jihadist appeared to prefer al Qaeda's more "traditional" acts of terror. After saying the "slaughter" of Americans must be carried out in accordance with Sharia law, he posted a picture of the beheading of Nick Berg, an American businessman murdered in Iraq in 2004. "Maybe this is the best way," the jihadist wrote next to the picture.
The idea of cannibalizing Americans also appeared on another site, the Ana Muslim forum. But SITE Intelligence Group says users there tended to dismiss the citation as a "gross exaggeration" and "viewed the proponents of the argument as beastly." Still, chatter on such sites is keenly monitored by western governments in a bid to spot clues about possible Islamist attacks.
National Post
Thu Jul 2 2009
Steven Edwards is United Nations-based correspondent for Canwest News Service
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Imagine the confusion for Gaza's Hamas leader Ismail Haniya: In a single day, he opens his mail to find a letter from Human Rights Watch that calls on him to "investigate" rocket firings from Gaza against Israeli population centres; then he opens his copy of the New York Times to find an op-ed by HRW's very founder, Robert Bernstein, who accuses the monitoring group of having an anti-Israel bias.
This is on top of the recent claims that HRW's senior military advisor, Marc Garlasco, is an avid collector of Nazi and other military memorabilia. What's the Hamas chief to believe? Is the letter a concerted effort to get him to probe some of the 12,000 rockets fired into southern Israel since 2001? Or is it sent tongue-in-check by a group that, in the words of Bernstein, has come to issue reports that are "helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state"?
HRW told Haniya that "Hamas, just like Israel, needs to make clear to its forces that unlawful attacks on civilians will not be ignored."
Now let me get this straight: HRW is urging that Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel through jihadist "holy war," should find and punish Palestinian fighters for killing Israeli civilians? That's about as likely to happen as hearing that a Palestinian Kassam rocket actually hit one of its ostensible "military" targets. The organization exists to wipe the region clear of all Jews -- uniformed and civilian. That's what Hamas means when it says it is resisting the "occupier", even though Israel dismantled its Gaza settlements in 2005.
The missive's point of reference is the recent United Nations report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter's war in Gaza. Its 574 pages focus most of the harsh language on Israel, but indicate Palestinian fighters committed possible war crimes too. Israel sees the Goldstone report as a document that unacceptably equates its bid to defend itself as a sovereign country with the actions of terrorists bent on realizing the Hamas charter's goal of eliminating a Jewish-majority state in the region.
Similarly, HRW's sending its letter to Hamas arguably legitimizes a movement, any credible and successful investigation of which would run counter to one of its central reasons for existing. Bernstein wrote in Tuesday's New York Times that he founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 as an organization that aimed to "pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms, and support dissenters."
But he charges that "now the group, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies." Bernstein claims that the "most[ly] ... brutal, closed and autocratic" Arab and Iranian regimes that "rule over some 350 million people" are "being ignored as Human Rights Watch's Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel."
HRW rejected the criticism - then Wednesday revealed its letter to Haniya. The two will not have been connected, so the letter is not some form of rushed-out project aimed at showing HRW is "balanced" in its approach. But the letter points out to Hamas - which most western governments list as a terrorist organization - that it has in the past "failed to investigate its fighters and commanders who violated the laws of war."
It also cites the Goldstone report in saying that the investigation found "no evidence of any system of public monitoring or accountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law set up by the Gaza authorities."
So why elevate Hamas to the level of rational government by calling for a probe into the rocket firings, when Hamas is the one organizing the rockets? The call appears to hang on a few statements by Hamas Foreign Ministry advisor Ahmad Yusuf, who said the group would "try to do our best" to investigate the rocket attacks. As if Hamas, with its near-terrorist charter, would be "shamed" into conducting a credible probe because of what one of its members said as part of its doublespeak on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In its response to Bernstein's accusations, HRW revealed Bernstein raised them at an April board meeting, and that the organization "rejected his view HRW should report only on closed societies."
"Open societies and democracies commit human rights abuses too and Human Rights Watch has an important role to play in documenting those abuses," the response says.
In fairness, HRW is by far one of the better international monitoring organizations. Among other reports, it this year documented alleged human rights violations by Palestinians on Palestinians. It issued a report last year on the detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, which I have visited many times as a journalist covering the Omar Khadr case. It appeared fair; certainly not over the top.
As for Garlasco, he's readily admitted to being a "military geek." In response to the publicity about his hobby, he says it makes him a better investigator and analyst.
"To suggest it shows Nazi tendencies is defamatory nonsense, spread maliciously by people with an interest in trying to undermine Human Rights Watch's reporting," Garlasco wrote.
Fine, but there appears to be more downside in the bid to advance respect for human rights by trying to corner Hamas in an apparent game of "gotcha" - just because someone uttered a righteous statement here or there. Far better, surely, to plug away at getting the group to renounce violence and declare that Israel has a right to exist - even if borders and other issues have yet to be agreed.
National Post
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
The Obama administration's own scrutiny of the detention camps - a visit by his attorney general Eric Holder, and Obama's personally ordered task force study - have resulted in stamps of approval for the conditions there.
Yet Holder also said the Obama administration remained "determined" to shut down the facility within the president's deadline of a year set during inauguration week.
Huh?
Obama continues to authorize the U.S. military to hold without trial enemy combatants captured and imprisoned overseas - so pressing ahead with closure has nothing to do with the complex question of whom to hold, for how long and under what legal mechanism while terrorism remains an international threat.
Instead it's pandering to critics like the detainee lawyer this past week who said guards "trying to get their kicks in" while they can had made Guantanamo a worse place than under former President George W. Bush.
"According to my clients, there has been a ramping up of abuse since President Obama was inaugurated," said Ahmed Ghappour, who works with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 Guantanamo detainees.
The British-American lawyer cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, pepper spray directed into closed cells or applied to toilet paper, and over force-feeding detainees who are on hunger strike.
Holder told reporters he saw nothing to support the allegations during his tour of the camps, which Bush established at the U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"It is being well-run now," he said. He was "impressed" by the work the guards were doing, and thought the facilities were "good ones."
Holder's assessment came just two days after Obama's task force released an 81-page report on its exhaustive study of the Guantanamo facilities, and concluded they are "in conformity with Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions." That's the one that deals with protections for combatants not fighting for a particular country.
The task force conducted more than 100 interviews with leadership, support staff, interrogators, guards and about a dozen detainees, according to the report's author, Vice-Admiral Patrick Walsh, who led the team.
Cynics might scoff that the detainees interviewed had been conditioned to give the "right" answers. No conditioning necessary for the likes of Khalid Sheik Mohammed - the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind who the CIA admitted to "waterboarding" when it held him.
He complained about a lack of cushions in the van used to deliver him to the courtroom during his tribunal appearance in January - which also may prove to be the last hearing now that Obama's 120-day suspension request has kicked in. It's sure Mohammed had been getting his newspaper delivery: he waved a copy of the Washington Post as he pressed another point during a discussion of protection of classified information.
Anecdotally, soldiers told me last year there had been a short-term shortage of fresh vegetables at the base - but the military brass ordered the detainees be served with the first batch flown in.
It is far less clear what went on in Guantanamo in the early days of the facility, when the scramble for intelligence to avert a feared follow-up to 9/11 was at high pitch.
Even Susan Crawford, the Bush administration's top official overseeing the military commission charges, ruled the combination of coercive interrogation techniques used against accused 9/11 plotter Mohammed al-Qahtani in late 2002 and early 2003 amounted to torture.
But this is today - and the panic of that period is supposedly over.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell summed up the illogic of closing the camps as he spoke at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:
"The new Attorney General visited Guantanamo ... and he returned with a glowing report. He said it was well-run, that he was impressed with the people in charge, and that every single person there has to be moved out and Guantanamo shut down in less than a year."
The common refrain is that Guantanamo is now far too sullied to be saved. But isn't this a natural "re-sell" job to which Obama could apply his celebrated rhetorical skills?
I believe the phrase businesses use is: "Under New Management."
Obama's task force looked at 20 allegations of abuse, 14 of which were substantiated. Generally Walsh said the abuse ranged from "gestures, comments, disrespect" to "preemptive use of pepper spray". You risk more on a Friday night in a Manhattan bar.
As it stands, the European Union is moving at a snail's pace in working with the Obama administration to help it empty the camps. Meanwhile, three Republican congressmen from Virginia are reflecting widespread sentiment across America by pushing to ban the federal government from transferring Guantanamo detainees to their state.
The Canadian government, never an open critic of the concept of Guantanamo, is not keen to accept any detainees.
So better to work towards what's best for U.S. and Western security within the bounds of Western values - and ignore the critics.
"The new administration needs to show it's more concerned with safety than symbolism," McConnell succinctly and appropriately put it.
In any event, the hard-line anti-Washington activists among the Guantanamo critics won't be satisfied until they've secured massive government reparations for the detainees who end up released because the administration can neither charge them nor place them elsewhere.
Call it their Terrorist Bailout Plan.
National Post
Mon Mar 2 2009
Steven Edwards is Canwest News correspondent in New York. He has visited and reported from Guantanamo Bay more than a dozen times.
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
U.S. NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - U.S. President Barack Obama won applause from the political left for his inauguration-week pledge to shutter the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay within a year.
But with less than six months to go before the January "deadline" for closure, administration officials have begun using language indicating even they don't believe it can be done.
They now speak of the "goal" of meeting the deadline, as opposed to confidently referring to January as when the camps at the U.S. naval base in Cuba will be empty of terror suspects.
While the officials insist that European and other countries are on the verge of taking in a growing percentage of the remaining 229 detainees, the camps' combined population has declined by only 13 since Obama's January 20 inauguration.
One was a suicide, one was switched to New York for trial, and four were released in Bermuda without telling Britain, which is responsible for Bermuda's foreign affairs and security. The rest were released to countries that included Saudi Arabia, Chad and Iraq.
Little has also changed at the "Camp Justice" facilities serving the military tribunals former President George W. Bush launched at Guantanamo as a central part of his administration's long term response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Scores of giant army tents and Cuzco trailers built near the courts to house journalists, lawyers and others who would attend trials remain standing and furnished, complete with utilities service.
"I didn't see any bulldozers or forklifts lined up to start tearing them down," one U.S. official newly returned from the base said sarcastically.
Camp Justice appears to remain fully intact despite recent Senate testimony from the Pentagon's top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, who said it would be impossible to prosecute "some significant subset of 229 people before January."
That's all the more true because the Obama administration has ordered a suspension of trials until September to allow for a review all detainee files.
Far from gearing down the detention camps, there has been additional construction. One crew was building a meals-distribution centre between two camps last month, while another was putting up a class centre. Engineers were also putting the finishing touches to a satellite TV system as part of a program that offers TV privileges to a growing number of the maximum-security "non-compliant" detainees.
"Highly compliant" ones in the medium security camps - among them, Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr - already had access to programming that includes Arab-language sports broadcasts and the pan-Arab Al Jazeera news network in English.
Bush said at a 2006 summit with European Union leaders he wanted to close Guantanamo, but set no deadline as long as there remained a core of terror suspects that the authorities deemed could neither be released nor charged.
Obama, however, committed his administration to closing the camps before devising a plan for how it could be done.
He subsequently launched three task forces to study ways of overhauling Bush-era "war on terror" policies. But in an illustration of the complexity of the issues involved, two missed their reporting deadlines this week.
The task force reviewing detention rules got another six months to complete its work; the one reworking procedures for interrogations and custodial transfers to other countries - as occurred in the case of Syrian-Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar - has another two months.
The review of all detainees' files is the job of the third task force, but it is only half way through the list, administration officials said on condition of anonymity at a briefing this week.
The officials also admitted the task force has yet to make any decision on the question of indefinite detention of a "category of detainees who can't be prosecuted, but who pose a threat to the United States."
Administration critics say Obama put political gratification ahead of security by setting a deadline for Guantanamo's closure without first knowing what could be done with the detainees.
"It is easy to say that Guantanamo can be closed when you are a candidate for president," Senator Orin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told the Senate floor this week. "What is hard is taking a deliberative methodical approach and then formulating the proper plan to balance the safety of this country with the needs of lawful detention."
But the administration officials at the task force briefing blamed Bush's government, saying it dragged its feet on devising long-term anti-terror policy.
One spoke of how "tough policy questions" had "not been done heretofore." Another said the Obama administration wants to avoid more "multiple years of uncertainty."
Under Bush, the prosecution of terror suspects indeed advanced slowly. The military defence lawyers "detailed" to cases of indicted suspects turned out to be vigorous in challenging not only case evidence, but the newly devised Guantanamo "commissions" system itself. There have consequently been only a handful of cases resolved since Congress re-created the commissions after the Supreme Court struck down the original version of them in 2006.
The momentum had already begun to pick up by the end of the Bush administration, and military prosecutors say they are ready to proceed with 66 cases.
But seizing on the earlier delays, one of the administration officials at this week's briefing spoke as if they continued to be the central problem.
"The status quo . is unacceptable," he said. "Seven years, three prosecutions, endless litigation. That's not the swift and certain justice that the [president's] interested in making sure that we have."
In an apparent bid to hedge bets on Guantanamo's closure, the senior officials referred to January as "our goal," refusing to say whether it will be met.
Vice President Joe Biden, who is known for his not-always-accurate hyperbole, insists the administration has time to spare.
"We expect before January - well before January - we will have a decision on each and every individual being held," he said Thursday during a trip to Eastern Europe.
Americans are marginally in favour of keeping Guantanamo open, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey published this week. Forty-seven percent of 1000 people asked oppose closure, versus 45 per cent who approve, Pew says, citing a three percent margin of error.
In Canada, 70 percent of 750 Canadians asked were for closure, versus 20 percent against, according to the survey. The margin of error was four percent.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that premature Guantanamo closure and a shift of its detainees onto U.S. soil would be "cause for great danger."
Congress has approved legislation that prevents detainees being transferred to the United States through to the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, except for trial.
While questions remain about exactly what went on in the Guantanamo camps in the early days, no significant human rights group claims interrogation-related abuse occurs today. The military says interrogation-room meetings are voluntary, and focus mainly on camp efficiency issues.
A study commissioned by the Obama administration said the camps "conform to" Geneva Conventions requirements for detaining combatants not fighting for a particular country.
Dennis Edney, one of Khadr's Canadian lawyers, says he has told the 22-year-old to remember that "Guantanamo is not home." While he meant the comment to illustrate how abnormal Khadr's childhood had been growing up terrorist settings in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Canadian Foreign Affairs reports show that Khadr does get along well with camp guards, and engages in other activities. Khadr alleges having suffered abuse at the camp, however, during earlier years following his arrival in 2002, the same year the centre opened.
Central to a growing campaign to keep the Guantanamo camps open are 9/11-victim family members. Nine at the base this month for tribunal hearings included Judith Reiss, a self-described "dyed-in-the-wool" Democrat, who said her children called her a "Mama for Obama" ahead of the election last November.
"I wanted transparency, and I was told at meetings that this president was going to hear the voices of the victims," the Yardley, Pennsylvania, mother said as she clasped a picture of her son Joshua, killed in the World Trade Center collapse, age 23.
"Well, we're speaking. Republicans, Democrats, Independents are happy with Guantanamo Bay if they hear the truth. And we have an obligation to speak with one voice to [say], 'Keep this detention centre open.'"
Canwest News Service
Fri Jul 24 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
At maximum security Camp Five, building crews are putting up a class centre, and adding the finishing touches to a satellite TV system.
Between Camp Five and the mixed security-level Camp Six, which are next door to one another, construction of a meals-distribution centre is half-way complete.
The deputy chief administrator of the camps, navy Cmdr. Jeff Hayhurst, said the projects had been long planned.
But he also said U.S. President Barack Obama's inauguration-week pledge to empty the camps of the remaining 240 terror suspects before next January "has not had any effect whatsoever" on operations.
Could Obama be realizing that maintaining detention facilities at the U.S. naval base in Cuba is a good idea?
Rather, he is likely to confirm in his speech to the Muslim world Thursday that he is determined to see the demise of the Guantanamo camps.
This is despite a near revolt in his own party, succinctly expressed by majority leader Harry Reid, who said of the Guantanamo terror suspects: "We don't want them around the United States."
Only a tiny cash-strapped cattle town in Montana and a congressman from Michigan looking to boost the state's upper peninsula economy have shown any interest in accepting the suspects.
So the war on terror - launched under the Bush administration to prevent another September 11, 2001 attack - has come down to this under Obama: A job-creation program.
The immense shortcoming of the war on terror has always been that people are picked up and held without charge. It's a practice that defies the intent of the English-speaking world's very first step towards democracy in 1215, when the English nobles obliged King John to sign the Magna Carta. In ensuring certain rights for the king's subjects, the document led to the right of appeal of unlawful imprisonment.
When Obama and Dick Cheney recently went head-to-head in rival speeches over the direction of the war on terror, the former vice president reminded us that the early days after 9/11 were a time when drastic measures were felt necessary to discover if a new major attack was imminent.
Obama used part of his address to say that his administration had begun working on refining detention policies to - as he put it - make sure they are "in line with the rule of law."
He said a system would be developed involving "periodic review," so that prolonged detention was "carefully evaluated and justified."
That's where the focus needs to be - but taking apart a perfectly good offshore prison system in Guantanamo Bay appears folly when terror suspects yet to be captured need to be housed somewhere.
Few who visit the Guantanamo camps criticize either the quality of the facilities or the way they are run. The problem is all wrapped up in the image in mainly the Muslim world of the Guantanamo "brand".
And so couldn't Obama use part of his upcoming speech to the Muslim world to explain that Guantanamo has evolved from the place that earned it the reputation it undoubtedly continues to have in many people's minds.
If he has to, he could make the pitch that it's "under new management." He could personally lead a tour of the world's media to show the changes that have been made at an increasing pace over the last year.
Numerous additional opportunities now exist for even certain non-compliant detainees - they have long existed for the compliant crowd, among whom is Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr.
Just as Navy Cmdr. Jeff Hayhurst, deputy chief of the camps, did for a group of journalists this week, the president could promote to the wider world the new communal wing at the maximum security Camp Six. Or the soon-to-be available satellite channels in the supermax Camp Five.
These have been developed despite a recent spike in assaults on guards that include tossing of bodily fluids in their faces. Indeed, as we passed a group of maximum security detainees in a Camp Five yard, several ran to the fence screaming at us in English "Go away," and "You are criminals."
Khadr's camp has been enjoying satellite channels for months. Among several Arab-language feeds is the English-language service of the pan-Arab al Jazeera TV. "We give them nothing that would incite anyone," said Hayhurst. I'm not sure what that says about the Fox channel, which they don't get.
On the sports field, all recreation periods "end in a soccer game," Hayhurst said. An art class showed how the teacher was introducing the handful of detainees who take part to draw U.S. Wild West scenes.
So the prison in Guantanamo is not the problem; rather it's an ideal place to hold terrorist suspects at arm's length, but within reach of the United States so that judges, lawyers and others involved in war crimes courts can be easily ferried there for prosecutions of suspects.
Obama has changed course on several other measures. He needs to on this one too, while applying the country's best legal minds to apply the 800-year-old Magana Carta to the war on terror.
National Post
Mon Jun 1 2009
Steven Edwards is a Canwest News correspondent in New York. He has visited and reported from Guantanamo on numerous occasions.
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
The handlers also roundly denounced any conservative commentator who might mention (mischievously, admittedly) his Arabic middle name, Hussein.
They charged that such usage was "fear mongering."
Once elected, however, he personally insisted on his middle name being spoken at his swearing-in ceremony.
And now - in a gesture to the Muslim world - he has not only granted the first sit-down interview of his presidency to a pan-Arab television network, but uses the occasion to gush about his Muslim ties.
"I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries," Obama tells Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai.
Indeed, Obama's Kenyan father, Barack Sr., was born into a Muslim family - though he became an atheist before arriving in Hawaii, where Obama Jr. was later born.
Obama also famously spent four years as a boy in Indonesia - the world's most populous Muslim country.
All that's fine, except why was no one allowed to talk much about it before he snagged the Electoral College majority?
Obama's unprecedented decision to shun American domestic networks over his first sit-down appeared aimed at sending a signal to the Muslim world that his administration marks a distinct break with that of George W. Bush.
Like we didn't get that message from his pledge to close the detention camps at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba without so much as a plan for where he'll transfer its terror suspects.
But much of the interview, broadcast Tuesday, offered troubling stuff for anyone who believes the West isn't to blame for the Islamic world's wrath.
Obama agreed with Melhem's inference that Bush's use of terms like "war on terror" and "Islamic fascism" demonized all Muslims.
"I think you're making a very important point, and that is the language we use matters." Obama said.
"We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name."
True. But there was nothing particularly Bushist about the "war on terror" term, and a helpful Wikipedia entry explains how it dates at least to the 19th century.
Obama confirmed he intends to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital during the first 100 days of his presidency, but resisted Melhem's bid to know which one.
Of course, the smart money is on the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, while you can pretty much rule out Baghdad.
"You're going to see me following through with dealing with a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility," he said.
Obama explained he is going to educate people in both the United States and the Muslim world on how to get along.
"My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives," he said.
"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."
So that's the simple formula we've been we've been missing. Stay tuned to the new president for a couple of deftly worded, and theatrically delivered speeches - and centuries of Western-Islamic division will miraculously disappear.
Citing Iran's threats towards Israel, and its "pursuit of a nuclear weapon," Obama said the Islamic republic had "acted in ways that [were] not conducive to peace and prosperity."
"But I do think it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran," he added.
Better hurry. Iran will have enough uranium to make a single nuclear weapon later this year, the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies said Tuesday at the launch of its annual global review of military powers.
The fact is there have been plenty of talks, incentive packages and UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.
After the interview was broadcast Tuesday, Iran responded to the "extended hand" Obama said he was offering the Islamic republic.
"We are awaiting concrete changes from new U.S. statesmen," said an Iranian government spokesman. "On several occasions our president has defined Iran's views and the need for a change in U.S. policies."
Even by Obama's account, there will be no effective "change in U.S. policies." Washington and the West will still want to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. Hence, don't expect Tehran to see the offer of "more diplomacy" to be anything more than a gift of the time they still need to perfect the nuclear process.
Key parts of Obama's interview to the Muslim world were a collective mea culpa.
"We sometimes make mistakes; we have not been perfect," he said as one explanation as to why there is so much hate in the Muslim world for the United States.
In other words, it's America's and, by extension, the West's fault we've been under attack these past years.
He offered a similar apology when explaining his instruction to George Mitchell, the former Senator he appointed to begin seeking a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"What I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating ." he said. "So let's listen."
Oddly, the interviewer Melhem came across as the most honest of the pair when he admitted that, throughout the Muslim world, there was a "demonization of America" that's become "like a new religion" - complete with "converts and high priests."
That's the sort of reality Obama needs to get his head around - instead of saying the equivalent of: "We're wrong, you're right."
National Post
Wed Jan 28 2009
Steven Edwards is New York correspondent for Canwest News
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Now we hear that he and his team are looking at creating a special "terrorist" court to deal with the worst of the worst, whose cases are entangled in sensitive highly classified material.
So isn't that confirmation that there is, after all, a need for a "third way" to deal with enemy combatants in an age of terrorist warfare? Funny how the policy proposals change once the election mandate is secure.
The Bush administration created the Guantanamo tribunals at the U.S. navy base on Cuba in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Congress set them in law as the Military Commissions Act in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled executive power alone had been insufficient to bring them into being.
The under-construction new Obama court would be "some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administers justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts," according to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal advisor. In other words, it would include elements of the hated Guantanamo commissions.
It also reflects numerous expert calls for the creation of a terrorism-focused National Security Court, among them by counter-terrorism gurus Andrew McCarthy and Alykhan Velshi in their 2006 white paper submission to the American Enterprise Institute:
"Forcing the criminal justice system to deal with the non-criminal-justice problem of international terrorism reduces the quality of justice the system accords to ordinary Americans accused of crimes and presumed innocent," they wrote.
Not only that, they argued, relying solely on civilian courts in the fight against terrorism actually hampers that struggle.
"The discovery requirements endanger national security by discouraging cooperation from our allies," they said.
Now it's true these experts considered the Bush administration's commissions to be inadequate, but Obama had campaigned on the notion that civilian and traditional military courts would suffice.
While large swathes of the media have barely picked up on Obama's position flip-flop, the American Civil Liberties Union honed in with a statement Monday night.
"Any effort by President-elect Obama's transition team and their advisors to develop new procedures to try the Guantanamo detainees is a distraction and a doomed effort ." the group said.
"President Bush made the terrible mistake of believing he could make up a new system of justice for terrorism cases and that experiment failed miserably."
The ACLU position is not the first crack in Obama's united left-of-centre pre-election support: just days ago warnings emerged that African Americans in the poor and often crime-ridden inner cities could get "more angry" if Obama fails to deliver on the social programs he promised.
"Based on the . destitute situation . in [the urban] communities, it may be that people were elated by the election of Barack [last] Tuesday, but look around and say, 'Wow. Things haven't really changed for me as a person,' so instead comes a backlash," Dr. Delores Jones-Brown director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York, told me in an interview.
She emphasized in a follow-up e-mail Monday that her "true sense is that all of this is far more tentative" than she may have expressed in the interview. But frankly her "possible backlash" warning rings true, and is supported by other analysis.
African Americans retain high hopes Obama's administration will narrow disparities between their community and the wider American population even though he avoided campaigning on a platform that favours any particular ethnic group.
He has promised reforms aimed at increasing education standards and offering "affordable" health care coverage to all Americans. In a passage in his platform "Change We Can Believe In" he also addresses numerous social problems, many of which are proportionately more prevalent in the African American community than among whites.
Among them is his call for parents to "teach our sons that . what makes them men is not the ability to have a child, but to have the courage to raise one."
But Obama's election comes as the world faces a global recession.
"The real question for him is what's going to be the position of these various issues in the queue [as they compete for] federal resources," Hugh Price, visiting professor at Princeton University and former president of the National Urban League, told me.
"Obviously they are going to start with the economy."
Other priorities will be tackling energy dependence on fossil fuels as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while health care will be important, other issues, including education, will only be tackled "if there is energy and resources left," Price said.
Price surmised Obama will seek to address family values issues such as absentee fatherhood from the "bully pulpit," adding he didn't foresee significant federal funds being spent on programs in this area.
So it does seem that a pattern is already emerging that the "campaigning Obama" and the "ruling Obama" are two different people.
National Post
Tue Nov 11 2008
Steven Edwards is New York correspondent for Canwest News Service. He has reported from Guantanamo Bay on numerous occasions, including hearings for Omar Khadr on war crime charges.
© 2008 Postmedia Network Inc
Khalid Sheik Mohammed appeared to be quite the obliging enemy when he told a military judge in Guantanamo Bay in June 2008 that he seeks execution.
"Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time," the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks said as the judge pondered his request to represent himself. "I will, God willing, have this, by you."
Then along comes al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in a new taped message Thursday, warning the Americans they must spare the lives of the "warrior hero" Mohammed and four other accused co-conspirators.
If Osama gets his way, those 72 virgins martyrs are promised in paradise will just have to wait.
The other bizarre aspect of the new bin Laden tape was his threat that al-Qaida will kill any Americans it snags if the United States imposes the death penalty on the 9/11 five following convictions.
"The day America will have taken such a decision, it will have taken a decision to execute whomever we capture," said bin Laden.
But what American has al-Qaida ever released alive to this point? In the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter al-Qaida kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, the terror group even sent the U.S. State Department a videotape of his beheading. Mohammed admitted after U.S. forces captured him in Pakistan in 2003 that he had personally decapitated Pearl with his "blessed right hand."
"It's the height of absurdity for anyone associated with al-Qaida to even suggest that now, at long last, they're going to start treating captives badly," Reuters quoted an unnamed U.S. counterterrorism official as saying.
But it is perhaps significant that bin Laden saw fit to deride Barack Obama, the U.S. president, saying he was "following in the footsteps of" former President George W. Bush.
One analyst cited by Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab network that broadcast the tape, said it indicates the message has a dual meaning.
"Osama bin Laden believes that the euphoria which erupted in most of the Arab countries, Muslim countries, after the Obama election now is eroding, is disappearing," said Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper.
"Obama is not really as popular as he used to be when he was elected. So Osama sees the opportunity to say to the Muslim world: 'Obama is actually not going to deliver what you expect him to deliver; the peace process is completely dead; Jerusalem is boiling; al-Aqsa mosque is under threat of Israeli demolition - now the only way to treat Americans is the way we treated them on 11 September'."
If the hidden message really is that Obama has seen the sense in resuming the war on terror launched under the Bush administration, then America's most wanted man paid the U.S. president a huge compliment.
Now let's see Obama renounce the "Overseas Contingency Operation" phrase his administration invented to replace the far more accurate "war on terror" moniker.
National Post
Fri Mar 26 2010
© 2010 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: Khadr shows Guantanamo 'legal aid' is among the best
Full Comment
The newest turnover in the legal team of Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr shows the charged detainees at Guantanamo Bay enjoy the privilege of extensive high-value legal representation.If it's not the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for Pentagon-appointed attorneys, civilian attorneys offer themselves pro bono - whether they be opposed on principle to the Guantanamo tribunals, or attracted to the high-profile, historically significant cases for less selfless reasons.
Lawyers are plentiful even for terror suspects who say they don't want them - like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka KSM) and his four accused co-conspirators in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Twenty-six lawyers sat at the defendant-attorney benches last Thursday during the first hearing for the 9/11-five under the Obama administration. An invited father of a 9/11 victim made the count, expressing disbelief.
The attorney-turnout was on a day, even, that only three of the alleged terror group showed up - and one of them decided to leave early. The lawyer for Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi later charged the terror suspect had been "tricked" into leaving his cell with a false promise he'd be allowed to address the court - but the judge said there had been a miscommunication.
As al Hawsawi left the courtroom, a guard rushed to retrieve the cushion he'd been sitting on. It was presumably needed for use in the van that took the accused co-financier of the 9/11 hijackers back to his cell. KSM, the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind, complained on the eve of Barack Obama's January inauguration as president about the lack of cushions in the vans used to deliver him to court.
As last Thursday wore on, Walid bin Attash, one of the two remaining 9/11 defendants in the courtroom, showed his contempt for the proceedings by making a paper airplane, and tossing towards his accused cohort, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. But it floated to the floor, where one of the 9/11 lawyers picked it up, and placed it on Aziz Ali's bench. All in a day's representation, one imagines.
The plane had contained a message written by Bin Attash, whose charge sheet says he helped to select and train several of the 9/11 hijackers, was Osama bin Laden's body guard, and helped to prepare the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2000 bombing of USS Cole. But whatever the note said, Aziz Ali, the accused main moneyman of the 9/11 operation, never bothered to read it during the court proceeding.
It was at a separate hearing that Khadr, accused in the death of a U.S. soldier, picked a civilian as his new lead "court" attorney.
This follows his bid to dump his entire Pentagon-appointed team last month.
Barry Coburn of Washington has 28 years of experience as a criminal defence lawyer, and is listed by Super Lawyers magazine as having "attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement." So he's no slouch.
Khadr, 15 when U.S. forces snatched him from an Afghan battlefield in 2002, said his military team had been squabbling too much. He burst into tears in March, so fierce were their recriminations of one another as each vied to convince him that their respective plan for his case was the best one.
But that group had been the second team he's ordered fired. He gave most of the first one the push almost three years ago as he declared he planned to boycott proceedings. The Pentagon dutifully provided him with more lawyers.
Far from receiving too little representation, the indigent terror suspects at the U.S. navy base in Cuba may have access to too much.
Khadr began this year with three Pentagon-appointed military lawyers, two Pentagon-paid civilian lawyers, a military legal assistant, and two prominent Canadian human rights lawyers.
When he fired team members almost three years ago, the group had included a Pentagon-appointed lawyer with the Marine Corps, two Washington law professors and another Washington lawyer. There was a bid to bring on Gerry Spence, who came to fame in 1979 by winning a massive settlement for the family of Karen Silkwood - the nuclear plant worker whose story is told in the 1983 film "Silkwood." There were even thoughts of getting the Irish rock star Bono involved.
Compare all that to the options available to a regular penniless accused-perp in the United States. In many state systems, such folks are likely to be assigned a single case-burdened public defender, who may or may not be any good.
To be fair, the row that split the second team Khadr fired was well beyond his control or influence.
Even the chief of the Pentagon's Guantanamo defence office was involved in the squabbling, which has seen the protagonists of each side in the fight file ethics complaints against one another.
The new civilian lawyer emerged after Khadr spent the last month conferring with this two Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney and Nathan Whitling, who continue to work on his case pro bono, and appear to have made many personal, as well as professional sacrifices on his behalf. Also involved was navy Lt. Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, Khadr's pick as the single military lawyer the judge said last month he needed to retain under the military commission rules.
The tenacity of the Pentagon's "detailed" lawyers long ago dispelled any claims they were just government lackeys toeing the line of a process that would inevitably lead to conviction for the accused.
For instance, the military-led team that represented Osama bin Laden's one-time driver, Salem Ahmed Hamdan, famously brought down the whole military commission system in 2006 with its U.S. Supreme Court victory checking former President George W. Bush's power. It took an act of Congress to recreate the commissions.
Now the Obama administration is moving to amend the commission rules after a campaigning Barack Obama agreed with critics who said they fall short of providing defendants all the protections given in U.S. civilian and traditional military courts.
One of five changes already made public gives terror suspects the power to personally pick their military representation as long as the person they are choosing is "reasonably available."
Lack of clarity are the watchwords for the rest of the process as prosecutors scramble to keep up with rules changes in the preparation of cases, 66 of which are already on line.
"We are preparing these cases every day. We are ready to move forward, but we take our guidance from the president," navy Capt. John Murphy, chief prosecutor, told reporters in Guantanamo this week.
Translation: the task of case preparation has become akin to trying to hit a moving target. On the defence side, however, they seem to have all the manpower they need.
- Steven Edwards has visited Guantanamo Bay many times to cover the military commissions as a correspondent with Canwest News Service.
photo: Omar Khadr sits with his defense team during a hearing inside the court for the U.S. war crimes commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jul. 15, 2009. (Janet Hamlin/AFP/Getty Images)
Sun Jul 19 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: The new jihadi menu – eat your kill
Full Comment
If anyone ever doubted the West faces sheer insanity in the fight against the most extreme of the Muslim extremists, consider a discussion that recently erupted on a jihadist Web site based on the writings of one of al Qaeda's leading theorists. The thrust of the debate was that Muslim fighters may be justified in cannibalizing U.S. soldiers if they find themselves with nothing else to eat.The jihadist leading the exchange even said that, in a bid to instill fear into U.S. servicemen, Americans should be told Muslim fighters "smack their lips to eat the flesh of ... the eaters of hamburgers and Pepsi."
The chilling message refers to parts of a recently published book by Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who is best known as the spiritual mentor of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the first al Qaeda leader in Iraq, whom U.S. forces killed in 2006. In one section of the work, Maqdisi discusses the idea of having to do something that is otherwise forbidden, like "murder or eating food sacrificed for an idol," according Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group, which translates jihadist "chat" sites.
Maqdisi adds some scholars believe this has evolved to mean that Muslims, faced with hunger, are allowed to kill an enemy and "cannibalize him." Some jihadist respondents made light of the entry, which appeared on the al-Fallujah forum June 12. "If we are forced to eat Americans, we will make them [into] kabsa," said one, referring to a family of rice dishes served mainly in Saudi Arabia. It would have "the taste of gunpowder," the contributor added, before also saying the "limbs of apostates" could be turned into appetizers.
Another jihadist appeared to prefer al Qaeda's more "traditional" acts of terror. After saying the "slaughter" of Americans must be carried out in accordance with Sharia law, he posted a picture of the beheading of Nick Berg, an American businessman murdered in Iraq in 2004. "Maybe this is the best way," the jihadist wrote next to the picture.
The idea of cannibalizing Americans also appeared on another site, the Ana Muslim forum. But SITE Intelligence Group says users there tended to dismiss the citation as a "gross exaggeration" and "viewed the proponents of the argument as beastly." Still, chatter on such sites is keenly monitored by western governments in a bid to spot clues about possible Islamist attacks.
National Post
Thu Jul 2 2009
Steven Edwards is United Nations-based correspondent for Canwest News Service
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: The two faces of Human Rights Watch
Full CommentImagine the confusion for Gaza's Hamas leader Ismail Haniya: In a single day, he opens his mail to find a letter from Human Rights Watch that calls on him to "investigate" rocket firings from Gaza against Israeli population centres; then he opens his copy of the New York Times to find an op-ed by HRW's very founder, Robert Bernstein, who accuses the monitoring group of having an anti-Israel bias.
This is on top of the recent claims that HRW's senior military advisor, Marc Garlasco, is an avid collector of Nazi and other military memorabilia. What's the Hamas chief to believe? Is the letter a concerted effort to get him to probe some of the 12,000 rockets fired into southern Israel since 2001? Or is it sent tongue-in-check by a group that, in the words of Bernstein, has come to issue reports that are "helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state"?
HRW told Haniya that "Hamas, just like Israel, needs to make clear to its forces that unlawful attacks on civilians will not be ignored."
Now let me get this straight: HRW is urging that Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel through jihadist "holy war," should find and punish Palestinian fighters for killing Israeli civilians? That's about as likely to happen as hearing that a Palestinian Kassam rocket actually hit one of its ostensible "military" targets. The organization exists to wipe the region clear of all Jews -- uniformed and civilian. That's what Hamas means when it says it is resisting the "occupier", even though Israel dismantled its Gaza settlements in 2005.
The missive's point of reference is the recent United Nations report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter's war in Gaza. Its 574 pages focus most of the harsh language on Israel, but indicate Palestinian fighters committed possible war crimes too. Israel sees the Goldstone report as a document that unacceptably equates its bid to defend itself as a sovereign country with the actions of terrorists bent on realizing the Hamas charter's goal of eliminating a Jewish-majority state in the region.
Similarly, HRW's sending its letter to Hamas arguably legitimizes a movement, any credible and successful investigation of which would run counter to one of its central reasons for existing. Bernstein wrote in Tuesday's New York Times that he founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 as an organization that aimed to "pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms, and support dissenters."
But he charges that "now the group, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies." Bernstein claims that the "most[ly] ... brutal, closed and autocratic" Arab and Iranian regimes that "rule over some 350 million people" are "being ignored as Human Rights Watch's Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel."
HRW rejected the criticism - then Wednesday revealed its letter to Haniya. The two will not have been connected, so the letter is not some form of rushed-out project aimed at showing HRW is "balanced" in its approach. But the letter points out to Hamas - which most western governments list as a terrorist organization - that it has in the past "failed to investigate its fighters and commanders who violated the laws of war."
It also cites the Goldstone report in saying that the investigation found "no evidence of any system of public monitoring or accountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law set up by the Gaza authorities."
So why elevate Hamas to the level of rational government by calling for a probe into the rocket firings, when Hamas is the one organizing the rockets? The call appears to hang on a few statements by Hamas Foreign Ministry advisor Ahmad Yusuf, who said the group would "try to do our best" to investigate the rocket attacks. As if Hamas, with its near-terrorist charter, would be "shamed" into conducting a credible probe because of what one of its members said as part of its doublespeak on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In its response to Bernstein's accusations, HRW revealed Bernstein raised them at an April board meeting, and that the organization "rejected his view HRW should report only on closed societies."
"Open societies and democracies commit human rights abuses too and Human Rights Watch has an important role to play in documenting those abuses," the response says.
In fairness, HRW is by far one of the better international monitoring organizations. Among other reports, it this year documented alleged human rights violations by Palestinians on Palestinians. It issued a report last year on the detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, which I have visited many times as a journalist covering the Omar Khadr case. It appeared fair; certainly not over the top.
As for Garlasco, he's readily admitted to being a "military geek." In response to the publicity about his hobby, he says it makes him a better investigator and analyst.
"To suggest it shows Nazi tendencies is defamatory nonsense, spread maliciously by people with an interest in trying to undermine Human Rights Watch's reporting," Garlasco wrote.
Fine, but there appears to be more downside in the bid to advance respect for human rights by trying to corner Hamas in an apparent game of "gotcha" - just because someone uttered a righteous statement here or there. Far better, surely, to plug away at getting the group to renounce violence and declare that Israel has a right to exist - even if borders and other issues have yet to be agreed.
National Post
Thu Oct 22 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: Guantanamo pullout is a defeat of sense by sensibility
Full Comment
Barack Obama promised change as president, but we're to get change for change's sake with Guantanamo Bay.The Obama administration's own scrutiny of the detention camps - a visit by his attorney general Eric Holder, and Obama's personally ordered task force study - have resulted in stamps of approval for the conditions there.
Yet Holder also said the Obama administration remained "determined" to shut down the facility within the president's deadline of a year set during inauguration week.
Huh?
Obama continues to authorize the U.S. military to hold without trial enemy combatants captured and imprisoned overseas - so pressing ahead with closure has nothing to do with the complex question of whom to hold, for how long and under what legal mechanism while terrorism remains an international threat.
Instead it's pandering to critics like the detainee lawyer this past week who said guards "trying to get their kicks in" while they can had made Guantanamo a worse place than under former President George W. Bush.
"According to my clients, there has been a ramping up of abuse since President Obama was inaugurated," said Ahmed Ghappour, who works with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 Guantanamo detainees.
The British-American lawyer cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, pepper spray directed into closed cells or applied to toilet paper, and over force-feeding detainees who are on hunger strike.
Holder told reporters he saw nothing to support the allegations during his tour of the camps, which Bush established at the U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"It is being well-run now," he said. He was "impressed" by the work the guards were doing, and thought the facilities were "good ones."
Holder's assessment came just two days after Obama's task force released an 81-page report on its exhaustive study of the Guantanamo facilities, and concluded they are "in conformity with Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions." That's the one that deals with protections for combatants not fighting for a particular country.
The task force conducted more than 100 interviews with leadership, support staff, interrogators, guards and about a dozen detainees, according to the report's author, Vice-Admiral Patrick Walsh, who led the team.
Cynics might scoff that the detainees interviewed had been conditioned to give the "right" answers. No conditioning necessary for the likes of Khalid Sheik Mohammed - the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind who the CIA admitted to "waterboarding" when it held him.
He complained about a lack of cushions in the van used to deliver him to the courtroom during his tribunal appearance in January - which also may prove to be the last hearing now that Obama's 120-day suspension request has kicked in. It's sure Mohammed had been getting his newspaper delivery: he waved a copy of the Washington Post as he pressed another point during a discussion of protection of classified information.
Anecdotally, soldiers told me last year there had been a short-term shortage of fresh vegetables at the base - but the military brass ordered the detainees be served with the first batch flown in.
It is far less clear what went on in Guantanamo in the early days of the facility, when the scramble for intelligence to avert a feared follow-up to 9/11 was at high pitch.
Even Susan Crawford, the Bush administration's top official overseeing the military commission charges, ruled the combination of coercive interrogation techniques used against accused 9/11 plotter Mohammed al-Qahtani in late 2002 and early 2003 amounted to torture.
But this is today - and the panic of that period is supposedly over.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell summed up the illogic of closing the camps as he spoke at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:
"The new Attorney General visited Guantanamo ... and he returned with a glowing report. He said it was well-run, that he was impressed with the people in charge, and that every single person there has to be moved out and Guantanamo shut down in less than a year."
The common refrain is that Guantanamo is now far too sullied to be saved. But isn't this a natural "re-sell" job to which Obama could apply his celebrated rhetorical skills?
I believe the phrase businesses use is: "Under New Management."
Obama's task force looked at 20 allegations of abuse, 14 of which were substantiated. Generally Walsh said the abuse ranged from "gestures, comments, disrespect" to "preemptive use of pepper spray". You risk more on a Friday night in a Manhattan bar.
As it stands, the European Union is moving at a snail's pace in working with the Obama administration to help it empty the camps. Meanwhile, three Republican congressmen from Virginia are reflecting widespread sentiment across America by pushing to ban the federal government from transferring Guantanamo detainees to their state.
The Canadian government, never an open critic of the concept of Guantanamo, is not keen to accept any detainees.
So better to work towards what's best for U.S. and Western security within the bounds of Western values - and ignore the critics.
"The new administration needs to show it's more concerned with safety than symbolism," McConnell succinctly and appropriately put it.
In any event, the hard-line anti-Washington activists among the Guantanamo critics won't be satisfied until they've secured massive government reparations for the detainees who end up released because the administration can neither charge them nor place them elsewhere.
Call it their Terrorist Bailout Plan.
National Post
Mon Mar 2 2009
Steven Edwards is Canwest News correspondent in New York. He has visited and reported from Guantanamo Bay more than a dozen times.
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: Guantanamo shows no signs of closure
Full CommentU.S. NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - U.S. President Barack Obama won applause from the political left for his inauguration-week pledge to shutter the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay within a year.
But with less than six months to go before the January "deadline" for closure, administration officials have begun using language indicating even they don't believe it can be done.
They now speak of the "goal" of meeting the deadline, as opposed to confidently referring to January as when the camps at the U.S. naval base in Cuba will be empty of terror suspects.
While the officials insist that European and other countries are on the verge of taking in a growing percentage of the remaining 229 detainees, the camps' combined population has declined by only 13 since Obama's January 20 inauguration.
One was a suicide, one was switched to New York for trial, and four were released in Bermuda without telling Britain, which is responsible for Bermuda's foreign affairs and security. The rest were released to countries that included Saudi Arabia, Chad and Iraq.
Little has also changed at the "Camp Justice" facilities serving the military tribunals former President George W. Bush launched at Guantanamo as a central part of his administration's long term response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Scores of giant army tents and Cuzco trailers built near the courts to house journalists, lawyers and others who would attend trials remain standing and furnished, complete with utilities service.
"I didn't see any bulldozers or forklifts lined up to start tearing them down," one U.S. official newly returned from the base said sarcastically.
Camp Justice appears to remain fully intact despite recent Senate testimony from the Pentagon's top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, who said it would be impossible to prosecute "some significant subset of 229 people before January."
That's all the more true because the Obama administration has ordered a suspension of trials until September to allow for a review all detainee files.
Far from gearing down the detention camps, there has been additional construction. One crew was building a meals-distribution centre between two camps last month, while another was putting up a class centre. Engineers were also putting the finishing touches to a satellite TV system as part of a program that offers TV privileges to a growing number of the maximum-security "non-compliant" detainees.
"Highly compliant" ones in the medium security camps - among them, Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr - already had access to programming that includes Arab-language sports broadcasts and the pan-Arab Al Jazeera news network in English.
Bush said at a 2006 summit with European Union leaders he wanted to close Guantanamo, but set no deadline as long as there remained a core of terror suspects that the authorities deemed could neither be released nor charged.
Obama, however, committed his administration to closing the camps before devising a plan for how it could be done.
He subsequently launched three task forces to study ways of overhauling Bush-era "war on terror" policies. But in an illustration of the complexity of the issues involved, two missed their reporting deadlines this week.
The task force reviewing detention rules got another six months to complete its work; the one reworking procedures for interrogations and custodial transfers to other countries - as occurred in the case of Syrian-Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar - has another two months.
The review of all detainees' files is the job of the third task force, but it is only half way through the list, administration officials said on condition of anonymity at a briefing this week.
The officials also admitted the task force has yet to make any decision on the question of indefinite detention of a "category of detainees who can't be prosecuted, but who pose a threat to the United States."
Administration critics say Obama put political gratification ahead of security by setting a deadline for Guantanamo's closure without first knowing what could be done with the detainees.
"It is easy to say that Guantanamo can be closed when you are a candidate for president," Senator Orin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told the Senate floor this week. "What is hard is taking a deliberative methodical approach and then formulating the proper plan to balance the safety of this country with the needs of lawful detention."
But the administration officials at the task force briefing blamed Bush's government, saying it dragged its feet on devising long-term anti-terror policy.
One spoke of how "tough policy questions" had "not been done heretofore." Another said the Obama administration wants to avoid more "multiple years of uncertainty."
Under Bush, the prosecution of terror suspects indeed advanced slowly. The military defence lawyers "detailed" to cases of indicted suspects turned out to be vigorous in challenging not only case evidence, but the newly devised Guantanamo "commissions" system itself. There have consequently been only a handful of cases resolved since Congress re-created the commissions after the Supreme Court struck down the original version of them in 2006.
The momentum had already begun to pick up by the end of the Bush administration, and military prosecutors say they are ready to proceed with 66 cases.
But seizing on the earlier delays, one of the administration officials at this week's briefing spoke as if they continued to be the central problem.
"The status quo . is unacceptable," he said. "Seven years, three prosecutions, endless litigation. That's not the swift and certain justice that the [president's] interested in making sure that we have."
In an apparent bid to hedge bets on Guantanamo's closure, the senior officials referred to January as "our goal," refusing to say whether it will be met.
Vice President Joe Biden, who is known for his not-always-accurate hyperbole, insists the administration has time to spare.
"We expect before January - well before January - we will have a decision on each and every individual being held," he said Thursday during a trip to Eastern Europe.
Americans are marginally in favour of keeping Guantanamo open, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey published this week. Forty-seven percent of 1000 people asked oppose closure, versus 45 per cent who approve, Pew says, citing a three percent margin of error.
In Canada, 70 percent of 750 Canadians asked were for closure, versus 20 percent against, according to the survey. The margin of error was four percent.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that premature Guantanamo closure and a shift of its detainees onto U.S. soil would be "cause for great danger."
Congress has approved legislation that prevents detainees being transferred to the United States through to the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, except for trial.
While questions remain about exactly what went on in the Guantanamo camps in the early days, no significant human rights group claims interrogation-related abuse occurs today. The military says interrogation-room meetings are voluntary, and focus mainly on camp efficiency issues.
A study commissioned by the Obama administration said the camps "conform to" Geneva Conventions requirements for detaining combatants not fighting for a particular country.
Dennis Edney, one of Khadr's Canadian lawyers, says he has told the 22-year-old to remember that "Guantanamo is not home." While he meant the comment to illustrate how abnormal Khadr's childhood had been growing up terrorist settings in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Canadian Foreign Affairs reports show that Khadr does get along well with camp guards, and engages in other activities. Khadr alleges having suffered abuse at the camp, however, during earlier years following his arrival in 2002, the same year the centre opened.
Central to a growing campaign to keep the Guantanamo camps open are 9/11-victim family members. Nine at the base this month for tribunal hearings included Judith Reiss, a self-described "dyed-in-the-wool" Democrat, who said her children called her a "Mama for Obama" ahead of the election last November.
"I wanted transparency, and I was told at meetings that this president was going to hear the voices of the victims," the Yardley, Pennsylvania, mother said as she clasped a picture of her son Joshua, killed in the World Trade Center collapse, age 23.
"Well, we're speaking. Republicans, Democrats, Independents are happy with Guantanamo Bay if they hear the truth. And we have an obligation to speak with one voice to [say], 'Keep this detention centre open.'"
Canwest News Service
Fri Jul 24 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: The new, inmate-friendly Guantanamo
Full Comment
For detention camps that are supposed to be closing in less than a year, there sure is a lot of construction under way at Guantanamo.At maximum security Camp Five, building crews are putting up a class centre, and adding the finishing touches to a satellite TV system.
Between Camp Five and the mixed security-level Camp Six, which are next door to one another, construction of a meals-distribution centre is half-way complete.
The deputy chief administrator of the camps, navy Cmdr. Jeff Hayhurst, said the projects had been long planned.
But he also said U.S. President Barack Obama's inauguration-week pledge to empty the camps of the remaining 240 terror suspects before next January "has not had any effect whatsoever" on operations.
Could Obama be realizing that maintaining detention facilities at the U.S. naval base in Cuba is a good idea?
Rather, he is likely to confirm in his speech to the Muslim world Thursday that he is determined to see the demise of the Guantanamo camps.
This is despite a near revolt in his own party, succinctly expressed by majority leader Harry Reid, who said of the Guantanamo terror suspects: "We don't want them around the United States."
Only a tiny cash-strapped cattle town in Montana and a congressman from Michigan looking to boost the state's upper peninsula economy have shown any interest in accepting the suspects.
So the war on terror - launched under the Bush administration to prevent another September 11, 2001 attack - has come down to this under Obama: A job-creation program.
The immense shortcoming of the war on terror has always been that people are picked up and held without charge. It's a practice that defies the intent of the English-speaking world's very first step towards democracy in 1215, when the English nobles obliged King John to sign the Magna Carta. In ensuring certain rights for the king's subjects, the document led to the right of appeal of unlawful imprisonment.
When Obama and Dick Cheney recently went head-to-head in rival speeches over the direction of the war on terror, the former vice president reminded us that the early days after 9/11 were a time when drastic measures were felt necessary to discover if a new major attack was imminent.
Obama used part of his address to say that his administration had begun working on refining detention policies to - as he put it - make sure they are "in line with the rule of law."
He said a system would be developed involving "periodic review," so that prolonged detention was "carefully evaluated and justified."
That's where the focus needs to be - but taking apart a perfectly good offshore prison system in Guantanamo Bay appears folly when terror suspects yet to be captured need to be housed somewhere.
Few who visit the Guantanamo camps criticize either the quality of the facilities or the way they are run. The problem is all wrapped up in the image in mainly the Muslim world of the Guantanamo "brand".
And so couldn't Obama use part of his upcoming speech to the Muslim world to explain that Guantanamo has evolved from the place that earned it the reputation it undoubtedly continues to have in many people's minds.
If he has to, he could make the pitch that it's "under new management." He could personally lead a tour of the world's media to show the changes that have been made at an increasing pace over the last year.
Numerous additional opportunities now exist for even certain non-compliant detainees - they have long existed for the compliant crowd, among whom is Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr.
Just as Navy Cmdr. Jeff Hayhurst, deputy chief of the camps, did for a group of journalists this week, the president could promote to the wider world the new communal wing at the maximum security Camp Six. Or the soon-to-be available satellite channels in the supermax Camp Five.
These have been developed despite a recent spike in assaults on guards that include tossing of bodily fluids in their faces. Indeed, as we passed a group of maximum security detainees in a Camp Five yard, several ran to the fence screaming at us in English "Go away," and "You are criminals."
Khadr's camp has been enjoying satellite channels for months. Among several Arab-language feeds is the English-language service of the pan-Arab al Jazeera TV. "We give them nothing that would incite anyone," said Hayhurst. I'm not sure what that says about the Fox channel, which they don't get.
On the sports field, all recreation periods "end in a soccer game," Hayhurst said. An art class showed how the teacher was introducing the handful of detainees who take part to draw U.S. Wild West scenes.
So the prison in Guantanamo is not the problem; rather it's an ideal place to hold terrorist suspects at arm's length, but within reach of the United States so that judges, lawyers and others involved in war crimes courts can be easily ferried there for prosecutions of suspects.
Obama has changed course on several other measures. He needs to on this one too, while applying the country's best legal minds to apply the 800-year-old Magana Carta to the war on terror.
National Post
Mon Jun 1 2009
Steven Edwards is a Canwest News correspondent in New York. He has visited and reported from Guantanamo on numerous occasions.
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: Suddenly Obama has Muslim roots
Full Comment
During the U.S presidential campaign, Barack Obama's handlers vigourously pointed out his Christian faith whenever the misconception arose he may be Muslim (even though the politically correct response should have been his religion doesn't matter).The handlers also roundly denounced any conservative commentator who might mention (mischievously, admittedly) his Arabic middle name, Hussein.
They charged that such usage was "fear mongering."
Once elected, however, he personally insisted on his middle name being spoken at his swearing-in ceremony.
And now - in a gesture to the Muslim world - he has not only granted the first sit-down interview of his presidency to a pan-Arab television network, but uses the occasion to gush about his Muslim ties.
"I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries," Obama tells Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai.
Indeed, Obama's Kenyan father, Barack Sr., was born into a Muslim family - though he became an atheist before arriving in Hawaii, where Obama Jr. was later born.
Obama also famously spent four years as a boy in Indonesia - the world's most populous Muslim country.
All that's fine, except why was no one allowed to talk much about it before he snagged the Electoral College majority?
Obama's unprecedented decision to shun American domestic networks over his first sit-down appeared aimed at sending a signal to the Muslim world that his administration marks a distinct break with that of George W. Bush.
Like we didn't get that message from his pledge to close the detention camps at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba without so much as a plan for where he'll transfer its terror suspects.
But much of the interview, broadcast Tuesday, offered troubling stuff for anyone who believes the West isn't to blame for the Islamic world's wrath.
Obama agreed with Melhem's inference that Bush's use of terms like "war on terror" and "Islamic fascism" demonized all Muslims.
"I think you're making a very important point, and that is the language we use matters." Obama said.
"We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name."
True. But there was nothing particularly Bushist about the "war on terror" term, and a helpful Wikipedia entry explains how it dates at least to the 19th century.
Obama confirmed he intends to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital during the first 100 days of his presidency, but resisted Melhem's bid to know which one.
Of course, the smart money is on the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, while you can pretty much rule out Baghdad.
"You're going to see me following through with dealing with a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility," he said.
Obama explained he is going to educate people in both the United States and the Muslim world on how to get along.
"My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives," he said.
"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."
So that's the simple formula we've been we've been missing. Stay tuned to the new president for a couple of deftly worded, and theatrically delivered speeches - and centuries of Western-Islamic division will miraculously disappear.
Citing Iran's threats towards Israel, and its "pursuit of a nuclear weapon," Obama said the Islamic republic had "acted in ways that [were] not conducive to peace and prosperity."
"But I do think it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran," he added.
Better hurry. Iran will have enough uranium to make a single nuclear weapon later this year, the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies said Tuesday at the launch of its annual global review of military powers.
The fact is there have been plenty of talks, incentive packages and UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.
After the interview was broadcast Tuesday, Iran responded to the "extended hand" Obama said he was offering the Islamic republic.
"We are awaiting concrete changes from new U.S. statesmen," said an Iranian government spokesman. "On several occasions our president has defined Iran's views and the need for a change in U.S. policies."
Even by Obama's account, there will be no effective "change in U.S. policies." Washington and the West will still want to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. Hence, don't expect Tehran to see the offer of "more diplomacy" to be anything more than a gift of the time they still need to perfect the nuclear process.
Key parts of Obama's interview to the Muslim world were a collective mea culpa.
"We sometimes make mistakes; we have not been perfect," he said as one explanation as to why there is so much hate in the Muslim world for the United States.
In other words, it's America's and, by extension, the West's fault we've been under attack these past years.
He offered a similar apology when explaining his instruction to George Mitchell, the former Senator he appointed to begin seeking a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"What I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating ." he said. "So let's listen."
Oddly, the interviewer Melhem came across as the most honest of the pair when he admitted that, throughout the Muslim world, there was a "demonization of America" that's become "like a new religion" - complete with "converts and high priests."
That's the sort of reality Obama needs to get his head around - instead of saying the equivalent of: "We're wrong, you're right."
National Post
Wed Jan 28 2009
Steven Edwards is New York correspondent for Canwest News
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc
Steven Edwards: 'Terrorist court' plan shows a new Obama emerging
Full Comment
Let me get this straight. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama felt traditional military and civilian courts in the United States provided a perfectly adequate "framework" for prosecuting terrorism suspects - and that the Bush administration's military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay were a judicial abomination.Now we hear that he and his team are looking at creating a special "terrorist" court to deal with the worst of the worst, whose cases are entangled in sensitive highly classified material.
So isn't that confirmation that there is, after all, a need for a "third way" to deal with enemy combatants in an age of terrorist warfare? Funny how the policy proposals change once the election mandate is secure.
The Bush administration created the Guantanamo tribunals at the U.S. navy base on Cuba in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Congress set them in law as the Military Commissions Act in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled executive power alone had been insufficient to bring them into being.
The under-construction new Obama court would be "some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administers justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts," according to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal advisor. In other words, it would include elements of the hated Guantanamo commissions.
It also reflects numerous expert calls for the creation of a terrorism-focused National Security Court, among them by counter-terrorism gurus Andrew McCarthy and Alykhan Velshi in their 2006 white paper submission to the American Enterprise Institute:
"Forcing the criminal justice system to deal with the non-criminal-justice problem of international terrorism reduces the quality of justice the system accords to ordinary Americans accused of crimes and presumed innocent," they wrote.
Not only that, they argued, relying solely on civilian courts in the fight against terrorism actually hampers that struggle.
"The discovery requirements endanger national security by discouraging cooperation from our allies," they said.
Now it's true these experts considered the Bush administration's commissions to be inadequate, but Obama had campaigned on the notion that civilian and traditional military courts would suffice.
While large swathes of the media have barely picked up on Obama's position flip-flop, the American Civil Liberties Union honed in with a statement Monday night.
"Any effort by President-elect Obama's transition team and their advisors to develop new procedures to try the Guantanamo detainees is a distraction and a doomed effort ." the group said.
"President Bush made the terrible mistake of believing he could make up a new system of justice for terrorism cases and that experiment failed miserably."
The ACLU position is not the first crack in Obama's united left-of-centre pre-election support: just days ago warnings emerged that African Americans in the poor and often crime-ridden inner cities could get "more angry" if Obama fails to deliver on the social programs he promised.
"Based on the . destitute situation . in [the urban] communities, it may be that people were elated by the election of Barack [last] Tuesday, but look around and say, 'Wow. Things haven't really changed for me as a person,' so instead comes a backlash," Dr. Delores Jones-Brown director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York, told me in an interview.
She emphasized in a follow-up e-mail Monday that her "true sense is that all of this is far more tentative" than she may have expressed in the interview. But frankly her "possible backlash" warning rings true, and is supported by other analysis.
African Americans retain high hopes Obama's administration will narrow disparities between their community and the wider American population even though he avoided campaigning on a platform that favours any particular ethnic group.
He has promised reforms aimed at increasing education standards and offering "affordable" health care coverage to all Americans. In a passage in his platform "Change We Can Believe In" he also addresses numerous social problems, many of which are proportionately more prevalent in the African American community than among whites.
Among them is his call for parents to "teach our sons that . what makes them men is not the ability to have a child, but to have the courage to raise one."
But Obama's election comes as the world faces a global recession.
"The real question for him is what's going to be the position of these various issues in the queue [as they compete for] federal resources," Hugh Price, visiting professor at Princeton University and former president of the National Urban League, told me.
"Obviously they are going to start with the economy."
Other priorities will be tackling energy dependence on fossil fuels as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while health care will be important, other issues, including education, will only be tackled "if there is energy and resources left," Price said.
Price surmised Obama will seek to address family values issues such as absentee fatherhood from the "bully pulpit," adding he didn't foresee significant federal funds being spent on programs in this area.
So it does seem that a pattern is already emerging that the "campaigning Obama" and the "ruling Obama" are two different people.
National Post
Tue Nov 11 2008
Steven Edwards is New York correspondent for Canwest News Service. He has reported from Guantanamo Bay on numerous occasions, including hearings for Omar Khadr on war crime charges.
© 2008 Postmedia Network Inc
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