So Much For Justice

Here’s Crusader Codpiece assuring the Iraqi people that “democracy” and American goodness and rightness would ensure justice in the Abu Ghraib matter:

It’s also important for the people of Iraq to know that in a democracy, everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made. But in a democracy, as well, those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice. We’re an open society. We’re a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate in this case, what took place in that prison.

That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice.

Here’s reality, from an interesting piece by Philip Carter on Slate:

The Army’s official Inspector General report on Abu Ghraib—in stark contrast to the Taguba report, which found systemic problems with detainee treatment in Iraq, or the reporting of Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, which traced the blame chain from Iraq all the way to Washington—blames a few individuals and leaders for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Never mind that 94 separate incidents of abuse were uncovered by the report—with most happening at the time and place of capture, not at some central prison locations where a few bad apples happened to work. The Army was “unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse.”

It defies both reason and common sense to cite 94 separate incidents of detainee mistreatment, yet determine there were no systemic issues (like training, insufficient troop strength, and unclear legal rules) to fault.

[…]

Instead of promoting responsibility and the rule of law, the Army appears to care more for the Washingtonian principles of damage control and spin.

Meanwhile our vaunted regard for justice, fairness and the rule of law hasn’t kept them from undermining the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Guantanamo cases either:

… the administration announced its intention to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees full access to counsel to prepare their habeas corpus petitions and signaled that it would resume its relentless legal tactics to fight the detainees in the courts on a host of procedural issues. The administration also started to move forward with two sets of legal proceedings—Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions—to adjudicate the status of Gitmo detainees. These hearings purport to benefit the detainees, but may, in fact, end up hurting more than helping them.

[…]

The Justice Department’s lawyers make no attempt to hide this legal strategy. In footnote 14 of their filing before the federal district court in Washington, D.C., in Al-Odah v. United States, the administration’s lawyers explicitly reserve the right to litigate niggling procedural issues, such as whether this is the proper defendant in a habeas corpus action, and the proper location for such suits. There is some irony here, because those are the two grounds the Supreme Court used to kick back the lawsuit by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant in South Carolina. Even though the Justice Department lost in the other two terrorism cases before the Supreme Court, it now hopes to use the same procedural tactics it used to defeat Padilla’s claim to avoid petitions for habeas corpus from detainees at Guantanamo. The strategy appears the same: deny every right, and fight every claim, for as long as possible, so that interrogations and intelligence collection at Gitmo can continue unimpeded by legal process.

(May I just say here that the legal beagle Talking Dog had this one pegged from the get-go. He said immediately that it would be Padilla that would rule, with the military and the justice department using every niggling procedural rule they could to keep any of these guys from ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.)

Carter finds an interesting (and apt) analogy to the administration’s legal strategy with the reactionaries’ response to the segregation cases. Drag your feet kicking and screaming in every court in the land for as long as you can.

But, he also points out that the bigger issue — if there is a bigger issue than craven immorality — is that it is vitally important the the US demonstrate at least some of what Junior was spouting in that completely insincere interview on Arab TV. That is our alleged committment to the rule of law. There are people in the world, specifically non-radical muslims who are following this story a lot closer than Americans are. This could be a chance to tip them in our direction by showing them something in our system that truly is superior to the autocratic rule under which they currently live.

Instead, we are, once again, playing into bin Laden’s hands. The prisoners at Gitmo are useless for intelligence at this point. It would be so easy for us to simply do the right thing and reap the benefit of showing our system to have some real corrective aspects. But, we won’t under Bush. Like the segregationists, they would rather eat nails than admit they lost.