[Marxism] NYT: Guantanamo prosecutor who quit had 'grave misgivings' about fairness

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some people still feel a sense of responsibility, their conscience,
the small but sometimes insistent voice of ethics and morality which
was planted in them as children. Something stinks and they know that
the job they've been assigned to do, and have been carrying out, may
well come back to haunt them in the even that they should succeed.
In our cynical world, ideas like ethics and morality don't seem to 
hold a lot of interest, but some people obviously look at them and
actually are INFLUENCED by such notions a truth, justice, fairness
and other such notions.

In Guantanamo we see in microcosm what the United States would do to
the rest of Cuba, if only they could get their hands on it. Today's 
NYT and LA Times have editorials warning against the consequences of 
US policy in Guantanamo. There's little difference between Obama and
McCain on this, and neither one has advocated the only sustainable
solution to the Guantanamo problem: close the place and return it to
its rightful owners, the people and government of Cuba. Though Cuba
policy is sometimes described as a matter of "foreign" policy, it's
actually very much about what kind of a society the United States of
America is today, and how it's going to continue to evolve in the
days and years ahead.

When we see someone who couldn't be more conservative, by training
and by inclination, changing his opinion, and going over from the
persecution to the defense side in these kinds of cased, I think 
we have some reasons for feeling at least somewhat hopeful today.


Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
======================================================================
NY TIMES EDITORIAL: The Rule of Law in GuantÃnamo 
A federal judge in Washington has struck an important blow for the
rule of law by ordering that 17 detainees be freed from GuantÃnamo
Bay. But the Bush administration is fighting the ruling to avoid
having the case become an open window into the outlaw world of
President Bushâs detention camps.
------------------------------------
The administration is not afraid the Uighurs will take to the streets
against the United States government. It is afraid they will take to
the microphones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ref=opinion

LA TIMES EDITORIAL: The Shadow of Gitmo
Among the most ignoble legacies of the George W. Bush administration
will be the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo
Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Administration officials drunk on executive
power, disdainful of due process and indifferent to international
opinion established -- in a territory they wrongly thought was beyond
the reach of law -- a prison camp whose inmates comprised both
dangerous terrorists and bystanders caught up in the post-9/11
dragnet in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-guantanamo12-2008oct12,0,3688596.story
=========================================================================

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-gitmo12-2008oct12,0,5776503.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Guantanamo prosecutor who quit had 'grave misgivings' about fairness
Convinced that key evidence was being withheld from the defense, 
 Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld went from being a 'true believer 
 to someone who felt truly deceived' by the tribunals.
By Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 12, 2008

WASHINGTON â Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed
lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist
praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in
the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or
friends. So the devout Catholic -- working away from home --
contacted a priest online.

Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in
an August e-mail, "I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what
I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. . . .

"I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the
courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they
suffer, I'll lose a lot of friends."

Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice
from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer.

"How do I get myself out of this office?" Vandeveld asked Major David
J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan
Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers -- despite
Vandeveld's doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair
trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a "practical way of extricating
myself from this mess."

Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case,
the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military
duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the
"mess" he considers Guantanamo to be.

Vandeveld is at least the fourth prosecutor to resign under protest.
Questions about the fairness of the tribunals have been raised by the
very people charged with conducting them, according to legal experts,
human rights observers and current and former military officials.

Vandeveld's claims are particularly explosive.

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S.
government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had
against their clients, including exculpatory information -- material
considered helpful to the defense.

Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be
wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he
went from being a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived"
by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility
in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it
deprived "the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the
well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct."

Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor and Vandeveld's
boss, said the Office of Military Commissions provides "every scrap
of paper and information" to the defense. Morris said that Vandeveld
was disgruntled because his commanding officers disagreed with some
of his legal tactics and that he "never once" raised substantive
concerns.

Morris said last week that he had no idea why Vandeveld had become so
antagonistic toward the tribunal process, adding that the lieutenant
colonel's outspokenness angered him because it was unfair and was a
"broad blast at some very ethical and hardworking people whose
performances are being smudged groundlessly."

Vandeveld, who was prosecuting seven tribunal cases --nearly a third
of pending cases -- has declined to be interviewed about the
particulars of the Jawad case. But he did engage in a series of
e-mails with The Times about his general concerns, before being
"reminded" last week that he could not talk to the press until his
release from active duty was final. In the future, he said, he plans
to speak out.

"I don't know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the
politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be
exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight," he said. "I care not
for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would
expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, 
I hope we can rediscover some of our American values."

Some tribunal defense lawyers are preparing to call Vandeveld as a
witness, saying that his claims of systemic problems at Guantanamo,
if true, could alter the outcome of every pending case there -- and
force the turnover of long-sought information on coercive
interrogation tactics and other controversial measures used against
their clients in the war on terrorism.

For years, defense lawyers and human rights organizations have raised
similar concerns in individual cases. "But we never had anyone on the
inside who could validate those claims," said Michael J. Berrigan,
the deputy chief defense counsel for the commissions.

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vandeveld led a relatively
placid life outside Erie, Pa., with his wife and four children. 
He worked as a senior deputy state attorney general in charge of
consumer protection in the region, and he served on his local school
board in Millcreek Township.

Anyone who knows him, Vandeveld, 48, told The Times, "will probably
tell you that I've been a conformist my entire life, and [that] to
speak out against the injustice wrought upon our worst enemies
entailed a weather shift in my worldview."

Mark Tanenbaum, an English teacher whose children are friends with
Vandeveld's, remembers talking to him while sitting around campfires
at high school gatherings. "We talked a lot about religion. I'm
Jewish. We'd talk about faith, value-based philosophy. We were
kindred spirits in this.

"With him, it is all about doing the right thing."

Vandeveld, called to active duty after 9/11, received glowing
evaluations as a Pentagon legal advisor and judge advocate in Bosnia,
the Horn of Africa and Iraq. "An absolutely outstanding, first-class
performance by an extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable
and experienced judge advocate, whose potential is utterly
unlimited," his commanding officer, Gen. Charles J. Barr, wrote in
his June 2006 evaluation. "One of the corps' best and brightest. 
Save the very toughest jobs in the corps for him."

From his Iraq assignment, Vandeveld went to Guantanamo, where he
began locking horns over the Jawad case with Frakt -- a law professor
at Western State University in Fullerton and a former active-duty Air
Force lawyer who volunteered for the tribunals.

Frakt believed that his Afghan client was, at worst, a confused teen
who had been brainwashed and drugged by militant extremists who
coerced him into participating in a grenade-throwing incident with
other older -- and more guilty -- men. He insisted that the
prosecution was withholding key information or not obtaining it from
those at the Pentagon, CIA and other U.S. agencies that had
investigated and interrogated Jawad.

Vandeveld believed that Jawad was a war criminal who had been taught
by an Al Qaeda-linked group to kill American troops and, if caught,
to make up claims he had been tortured and was underage. Vandeveld
insisted that he had been providing all evidence to the defense.

But by July, Vandeveld told The Times, he had grown increasingly
troubled. He kept finding sources of information and documents that
appeared to bolster Frakt's claims that evidence was being withheld
-- including some favorable to the defense, such as information
suggesting that Jawad was underage, that he had been drugged before
the incident and that he had been abused by U.S. forces afterward.

Vandeveld also was having difficulty obtaining authorization to
release documents in his possession to the defense.

On Aug. 5, he e-mailed Father John Dear, a well-known Jesuit peace
activist. Dear, who boasts of being arrested 75 times in protests,
encouraged him to act, saying he might "save lives and change the
direction of the entire policy."

With Frakt pressing for the charges against Jawad to be dismissed due
to "outrageous government misconduct," Vandeveld proposed a plea
agreement under which Jawad, now thought to be 22, could return to
Afghanistan for rehabilitation. But his superiors rejected it,
Vandeveld said.

By late August, he had told Frakt that there were other "disquieting"
things about Guantanamo and that his superiors were refusing to
address them or to let him quietly transfer out, Frakt said in an
interview.

"Now might be a good time to take a courageous stand and expose some
of the 'disquieting' things that you have alluded to, whatever they
may be," Frakt replied in a Sept. 2 e-mail, noting that there would
soon be a change of administrations in Washington.

"It wouldn't be a bad idea to distance yourself from a process that
has become largely discredited, or at least distinguish yourself as
one of the good guys, an ethical prosecutor trying to do the right
thing," Frakt wrote.

On Sept. 9, Vandeveld e-mailed Dear to say he had resigned from the
Guantanamo military tribunals: "The reaction was the expected outrage
and condemnation. I have and will maintain my equanimity and, while
scared for me and for my family, know that Christ will watch over
me."

That, however, was only the beginning. In late September --after the
military, according to Frakt, initially tried to block it --
Vandeveld testified by video link for the defense, saying he believed
that insurmountable problems with the tribunals might make them
incapable of meting out justice fairly.

Morris said that Vandeveld is not qualified to speak about systemwide
problems at Guantanamo. But Frakt said that he is and that
Vandeveld's testimony and declaration only scratched the surface of
his concerns, judging by their extensive conversations and hundreds
of e-mail exchanges.

"There is a lot more that he knows," Frakt said.

josh.meyer@xxxxxxxxxxx










=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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