August 20, 2010, Military discipline
The President has every reason to be pleased with how the military is handling kangaroo courts show trials military commissions under his watch, as exemplified by the "interesting" holdings of military judge Army Colonel Patrick Parrish, who concluded that torture isn't torture when the American military does it, and fifteen is old enough when it's Omar Khadr "who was old enough" for whatever torture humane treatment the American military feels like inflicting on its juvenile captives.
The heretofore classified opinion has been released during an interregnum in the Khadr trial, the first commission trial in the Obama era... because Khadr's military defense attorney collapsed in court of apparent complications from surgery, resulting in a 30 day continuance. And merely "Orwellian" doesn't do it justice. Some highlights from Carol Rosenberg's Miami Herald piece:
``While the accused was 15 years old at the time he was captured, he was not immature for his age,'' Parrish wrote in a nine-page ruling dated Tuesday.****
Defense attorneys argued that Khadr's first interrogation, coupled with the rape scenario, so soon after U.S. medical forces saved him from chest wounds and eye injuries led the young Canadian to tell his captors whatever they wanted to hear.
But Parrish wrote that ``he had sufficient training, education and experience to understand the circumstances in which he found himself.''
****
Former Sgt. Joshua Claus, a former Army interrogator subsequently court martialed for detainee abuse, testified at a May pretrial hearing that he tried to soften Khadr up with a fictional tale of an Afghan captive who was sent to an American prison and raped by ``four big black guys.''
But the judge found ``there is no evidence that the story caused the accused to make any incriminating statements then or in the future.''
In making the document public on Friday, the Pentagon censored the names of a number of pretrial witnesses whose identities were made public at the summertime hearings.
They included a retired Army Reserves colonel, ophthalmologist Marjorie Mosier, who testified by name that she saved the Canadian's sight in a surgery at a military hospital in Afghanistan as well as another court-martialed former Army interrogator, Damien Corsetti.
Corsetti, known to Bagram detainees as ``Monster,'' testified by name that he felt sorry for the captive teenager who found himself ``probably in one of the worst places on Earth'' after his capture.
The decision to make Khadr, a Canadian juvenile who was tortured in American custody who engaged in ordinary combat, which ain't a freaking war crime as the Obama Administration's poster child for military commission trial... reflects a cynicism that makes Bush and Cheney look really good in comparison: they, after all, always supported military commissions. The President, by contrast, campaigned against military commissions because of the purported "constitutional values" arrived at by virtue of his time as a constitutional law professor senior lecturer,
Prior military commission judges tended to be very skeptical of evidence that bore the taint of torture; nice to see that those days are gone, and now that Barack Hussein Obama is President (hey, Mr., President, 19% of the country thinks you're a Muslim... so way to go, trying to make them happy by advancing the total security state)... it seems we have genuine military discipline... to wit, officers who do as they're told. The President wants a conviction here... and the fact that (1) the suspect was a juvenile, (2) who was unconscious at the time of the alleged "crime", (3) who confessed after being untreated for potentially mortal wounds with treatment tied to his "cooperation," (4) with an interrogator later court-martialed for abusing others who threatened him with gang-rape (5) FOR ENGAGING IN COMBAT AGAINST THE AMERICAN MILITARY WHICH HAD INVADED HIS COUNTRY, to wit, not "a crime" let alone "a war crime"... just isn't going to get in the way.
Assuming this country ever comes out of whatever zombie trance it's in now, in which most of its populace continues to crap in its pants not merely at the word "terrrrrorism," but now of course, at Muzz-lemms in general... and especially mosques (which, let's face it, sound an awful lot like our long-time other enemy, Moscow...) some day we'll look back at not just Guantanamo in general, but at the Khadr case in particular, and let out one huge throbbing "WTF?" We're a long way from there, of course, and I've kind of given up in believing that "the truth will set us free" or any other such claptrap, given that we have a medicated, obese, and not very bright population that is content to accept the lot that their betters dispense to them... and go all militant at even the prospect of progressive taxation, lest our betters "suffer" in any way. Did I say that out loud?
This has been... "military discipline."