Oh no, hope you still do the post!

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I swear Missy, you and I often on parallel lines, girl! Read that last night, and was planning a post on Ms. Burlingame today. Looks like you saved me the trouble! LOL

But it’s in my archives to reference on a future Gitmo post. Fascinating story that reveals it was… as I’ve said all along… nothing more than a dangerous photo op.

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Yeah, but it’s a good thing it’s closed now, though, as the haunting images here attest.
http://the-american-israeli-patriot.blogspot.com/2006/10/truth-about-gitmo.html

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Help, stuck in the filter. P&T.

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Ever wonder why the Jersey Girls made it into the press but no quotes or questions from someone like, Debra Burlingame? Miranda rights are the least of our problems with trying these animals. Biggest problem is obviously the president:

“President Obama clearly didn’t do his homework before ordering the suspension of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects. We have learned that even his own legal counsel admitted that Mr. Obama erred in discussing details about terrorism with families of victims last week, and that the administration was ignorant of a key point that terrorists exploit to their advantage.”

“…..President Obama was saying the right words in general, but when it came to specifics he was uncertain, uninformed, and sometimes just plain mistaken. Ms. Burlingame is an attorney who has followed closely the legal aspects of the terrorism cases, and her detailed, probing questions were met with stammers, stares, and statements that betrayed an understanding of the law that was, she said, “flat out wrong.”

Case in point: the president’s knowledge of the role of the Classified Information Procedures Act or CIPA. This law governs the way in which classified information is used in trials. The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants the right to confront their accusers and the evidence against them, but the government has an important interest in cases such as these in keeping sources and methods secret. Under CIPA rules, in cases where classified information is used, the government has the option of sharing the information with the defendant, or not using it.

The Bush administration sought to avoid this potential national security threat by resorting to other procedures in which 6th Amendment issues did not arise. But President Obama believes that the model for terrorism cases is the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Of course a number of those plotters escaped justice (some were found later hiding in Saddam’s Iraq, but that’s another story). More important, because of the openness of that process, al Qaeda learned a great deal about how to do a much better job next time – and even the classified information from that trial was in Osama bin Laden’s hands within weeks.

The terrorists have learned a great deal about conducting legal guerrilla war, using rules like CIPA to their advantage. Notice that more and more terrorists are dismissing their appointed lawyers and representing themselves. This gives them direct access to the classified documents that will be used in evidence against them. In this way they can learn about U.S. intelligence sources and methods – how they were targeted, what information was collected, and who may have been the traitors in their midst. Even if the names of sources are omitted, for example someone who was present at a key planning meeting, the terrorist defendant will know enough about the circumstances to be able to narrow it down. After all, the terrorist is familiar with every aspect of the events; he knows much more about them than the intelligence community.

The alternative to handing over the secrets is for the government to not use the evidence in question. That creates the incongruous situation in which the defense wants to maximize the amount of evidence that implicates them, and the prosecution wants to minimize it. (Our legal system was not designed to accommodate defendants who welcome being put to death.) According to Ms. Burlingame, Obama’s answer to this conundrum was “there is no reason we have to give [the terrorists] everything.” Evidently the former editor of the Harvard Law Review seems to think that one of his powers as president is personally to pick and choose which constitutional rights apply to terror defendants and which do not. That’s the very thing they were criticizing President Bush for.

White House Counsel Greg Craig, often seen whispering in the president’s ear during question periods, admitted later to Ms. Burlingame that the chief executive was getting the facts of the law wrong during the discussion with the families. Craig asked her if CIPA covers a case in which terrorists defend themselves, noting that “this is something we hadn’t contemplated.” If nothing else, this admission of ignorance is more evidence that the decision to rush ahead with closing Guantanamo and shutting down the military tribunals was ill-conceived, poorly planned, and may ultimately be injurious to our national security. The president may talk a good game about “swift, certain justice,” but it is becoming clear that justice will not be swift, is highly uncertain, and in the end may not even be just.”

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/12/obamas-outrageous-oversight/

Scott, I dont’t care for the way the following site is put together, not as classy as FA, but it does have current, pertinent facts about what’s going on at GITMO.

http://www.insidegitmo.com/

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Okay… so he knows where to find “reverse” in the syncromesh….

Of course there’s no solutions by anyone… including “that one”. If there were, they would have been utilized. The only solution was to park them on (what we thought was..) foreign soil and hold them as enemy combatants.

Thank you ACLU and SCOTUS. Welcome to reality and the beltway, Obama. We’re not right back where we started from… doo dahhh, dooo dahhhhhh

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“Surprisingly enough, this LA Times article doesn’t offer any solutions. It just whines. I know…color me shocked as well.”

Oh, oh. My box of “color me shocked” crayons is all out, …heavy demand this last couple of weeks.

@MataHarley:

“Obama took an already complex situation – further muddied up by a vague SCOTUS decision – and backed it it further into a corner.”

And here some of were thinking he had no talent.

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Yeah, I read this late last night before hitting the sack, Scott. I will say that the Human Rights mouthpiece didn’t think miranda would be a problem for the federal courts if they used interrogations related to intel gathering.

However, federal courts may find that Miranda does not apply to interrogations conducted for the purpose of intelligence gathering, said Gabor Rona, the international legal director for Human Rights First. Instead, judges may decide whether to accept confessions based on whether the statements were coerced.

“The idea that the failure to give Miranda warnings is a great impediment to using federal courts is a simplistic falsehood,” Rona said.

Problem with that is, what of any confessions offered up during that Miranda-immune interrogation period? Do they now have to read them Miranda rights, and get the confessions again, as those will be inadmissible?

Like I said before. Obama took an already complex situation – further muddied up by a vague SCOTUS decision – and backed it it further into a corner.

Lawyers and judges amid the controversy have noted that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has grounded U.S. policy in one arena or the other, leaving uncertain which set of rules applies.

A federal judge in Washington hearing habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo prisoners expressed frustration on the issue.

“I don’t understand how the Supreme Court made the decision it made and left that question open,” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said during an October hearing.

He’s set to close Gitmo with no plans for detainee relocation, no plans on how to prosecute the different levels of prisoners. Again, we are holding prisoners for an indefinitely length of time with no system in place to charge them.

And the ACLU is happy about that. Huh?

And all for nothing but a photo op.

Best I saw on all this was JR Dunn’s Obama’s Busted Bubble.

The War on Terror is easy. So why not take the enemy combatant imbroglio (aka “Gitmo”) already distorted to the point of delirium, and toss it into limbo on the grounds that you’ll get around to doing something about it eventually? O has singlehandedly returned the situation to where it stood in 2002, without the least notion of where to go from there. The sole opposition came from one courageous officer who continued the prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man behind the USS Cole attack, on the basis that no one, not even a certified messiah, has any right to interfere in ongoing legal proceedings. (Remember that one, constitutional law fans?) O sidestepped that problem by arranging to have the charges against al-Nashiri dismissed, a move that will undoubtedly sow panic and consternation through the ranks of Al Q and other Jihadis. Any bets that they’ll ever be reinstated?

Lots of other good “busted bubble” incidents in there, unrelated to Gitmo tho.

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