Its military tribunals exhibit such poor judicial standards that they may well convict innocent people, a former top Gitmo prosecutor said today. Guantanamo is “Stain on America”, Says Ex-ProsecutorBy Cliff Montgomery – Dec. 2nd, 2008Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”) military tribunals are a “stain on America”, with such poor judicial standards that they may well convict innocent people, a former top Gitmo prosecutor said today.Darrel Vandeveld, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who earlier this year quit his post at the Cuba base on ethical grounds, told BBC News that detainees cannot receive fair trials there.”I thought that the military commissions were part of a grand tradition in accordance with the highest of American values,” said Vandeveld.”Now I see them as having defiled the U.S. Constitution and I see them as a stain on America,” he added.”There should have been a procedure in place so that we could ensure due process and fair trials for these defendants. There was no such process,” Vandeveld told BBC News.Vandeveld told the BBC that the defining moment for him came after stumbling across the testimony of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan detainee charged with attempted murder. Jawad said in his testimony that he was tortured by his captors.The U.S. Army prosecutor found the documentation as he worked in the office a colleague. Vandeveld became irate that this potentially explosive evidence had not been sent to Jawad’s lawyers.”Under the rules, that absolutely had to have been turned over to the defense immediately,” said Vandeveld.”We haven’t given him all the evidence to which he is entitled, we haven’t complied with the rules,” he added.Vandeveld told BBC News that initially he had fully supported the Gitmo tribunals. The prosecutor added that at one point, he was the top prosecutor for one of every three pending cases at the Cuba base. But as time wore on, he became disillusioned with the systematic sloppiness of Guantanamo’s prosecution team.”I went from being a true believer to one who felt truly deceived,” he told BBC News.”Everything was in disarray, everything was contained in boxes that were not organized,” added Vandeveld.”I was convinced at that point that it was impossible to guarantee that they [the detainees] would get a fair trial,” he continued.”I was also concerned about the use of hearsay, and then also what we would call double-hearsay…That would never be admissible in a United States court–and of course coerced testimony would never be admissible. The evidence was in a state of chaos.”A Pentagon spokesman did his best to counter Vandeveld’s damning statements on Gitmo, claiming to BBC News that: “The military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes.”Full and fair trials? Why don’t we let the facts speak for themselves. In September, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released an interesting study on Gitmo’s judicial treatment of its accused. Below are quotes from the report’s executive summary:
- “Lawyers [have] filed dozens of petitions on behalf of the detainees in the District Court for the District of Columbia, where district court judges reached inconsistent conclusions as to whether the detainees have any enforceable rights to challenge their treatment and detention. [Emphasis added.]“In December 2005, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) to divest the courts of jurisdiction to hear some detainees’ challenges by eliminating the federal courts’ statutory jurisdiction over habeas claims by aliens detained at Guantanamo Bay (as well as other causes of action based on their treatment or living conditions).”“After the Supreme Court rejected the view that the DTA left it without jurisdiction to review a habeaschallenge to the validity of military commissions in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the 109th Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA)…to authorize the President to convene military commissions and to amend the DTA to further reduce access to federal courts by ‘alien enemy combatants,’ wherever held…“[But] In June 2008, the Supreme Court held in the case of Boumediene v. Bush that aliens designated as enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.“The Court also found that [the] MCA,…which limited judicial review of executive determinations of the petitioners’ enemy combatant status, did not provide an adequate habeas substitute and therefore acted as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas.“The immediate impact of the Boumediene decision is that detainees at Guantanamo may petition a federal district court for habeas review of the legality and possibly the circumstances of their detention, perhaps including challenges to the jurisdiction of military commissions.”
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