Willful Injustice

This is just awful:

Abdul Rahim Al Ginco thought he was saved when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrew the Taliban regime.

Mr. Ginco, a college student living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States.

But rather than help Mr. Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by his torturers.

“This was a 22-year-old kid who was brutally tortured,” one of Mr. Ginco’s American lawyers, Stephen R. Sady, said. “And instead of being liberated, he has endured four and a half years of additional confinement.”

It’s something out of Kafka, so surreal and horrifying that I honestly can’t wrap my mind around the fact that an allegedly civilized country would think this was ok.

But it gets worse:

A bill signed into law by President Bush last December requires the Pentagon to determine if information being used to hold a detainee has been obtained by coercion and “the probative value (if any)” of such information. Another law passed by Congress last month would ban the use of statements made under torture from the military tribunals that are to be used to prosecute some Guantánamo detainees.

But that second law, which awaits the president’s signature, would also sweep away most federal court challenges to the detention of Guantánamo prisoners, including perhaps the one filed by American lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who is now 28.

Well yes. To give this man the right to file a writ of habeas corpus would clog the courts and the terrorists will have won. Much better to leave his life hanging on the whim of the president or some faceless military bureaucrat, either of whom might wake up one morning feeling good about himself and decide to set this poor bastard free.

Really, when you think about it, we could totally unclog the courts by doing away with this archaic writ altogether and just count on the President’s pardon to take care of government errors and injustices. (Like Jack Abramoff, for instance.) This would be more in keeping with the traditional values that so many Americans would like to go back to — the traditional values of feudal England. This whole “rule ‘o law” thing is way overrated anyway.

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