Charges Against Guantanamo Bay Detainees Dismissed
NORTH GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — AP
Incompetence brings the whole system to a screeching halt:
Military judges dismissed charges Monday against a Guantanamo detainee who chauffeured Usama bin Laden and another who allegedly killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, marking a stunning setback to Washington’s attempts to try detainees in military court.
In back-to-back arraignments for Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, of Yemen, the U.S. military’s cases against the alleged Al Qaeda figures dissolved because, the two judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction.
They were the only two of the roughly 380 prisoners at Guantanamo charged with crimes, and the rulings stand to complicate efforts by the United States to try other suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban figures in military courts.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan
Hamdan’s military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said the detainee is “not subject to this commission” under legislation passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush last year. Hamdan is accused of chauffeuring bin Laden’s and being the Al Qaeda chief’s bodyguard.
The new Military Commissions Act, written to establish military trials after the U.S. Supreme Court last year rejected the previous system, is full of problems, defense attorneys argued.
The judges agreed that there was one problem they could not resolve — the new legislation says only “unlawful enemy combatants” can be tried by the military trials, known as commissions. But Khadr and Hamdan had previously been identified by military panels only as enemy combatants, lacking the critical “unlawful” designation.
The surprise decisions do not spell freedom for the detainees, who are imprisoned here along with about 380 other men suspected of links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Khadr was 15 when he was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002 in which he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier and was wounded himself. He is now 20.
Khadr, appearing in the courtroom with a beard and wearing an olive-green prison uniform, seemed uninterested when Army Col. Peter Brownback, Khadr’s judge, threw out the case. Khadr focused on his own image on a computer screen that showed a live TV broadcast of the proceedings.
The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the dismissal of the case against Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system hurriedly set up last year by Congress and Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system.
But legal experts said Brownback apparently left open the door for a retrial for Khadr, and that the Defense Department can possibly fix the jurisdictional problem by holding new “combat status review tribunals” for any detainee headed to trial.
Sullivan said the dismissal has “huge” impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an “unlawful” enemy combatant.
“It is not just a technicality; it’s the latest demonstration that this newest system just does not work,” Sullivan told journalists. “It is a system of justice that does not comport with American values.”
The Military Commissions Act, signed by Bush last year, specifically says that only those classified as “unlawful” enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted.
The distinction is important because if they were “lawful,” they would be entitled to prisoner of war status, which under the Geneva Conventions would entitle them to the same treatment under established military law that U.S. soldiers would get.
A Pentagon spokesman said the issue was little more than semantics.















June 5th, 2007 at 9:39 am ehttp://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1179819731442.shtmlWORDING of Ralph Giordano
PROVIDES 01.06.07, 10:59 h
My demand on the political line of the city to stop the plans for the building of a central large mosque in Cologne honour field because they sketch a wrong picture of the true relations between Muslim minority and majority company in view of the failed integration, brought in, unmistakably heavy murder threats for me and in Turkish language (with which I want to place this part of the minority not under general suspicion).
In addition I explain binding: I will turn also further tabooless against all Basic Law-adverse and thus integration-hostile conditions and conditions within the Muslim minority, everything in front against the inakzeptable position of the woman (like her nobody documented more shaking, as the Turkish Soziologin Mrs. Dr. Necla Kelek, in the name of all other entwürdigten and threatened suffering companions). I will also further critically take position against those Imams and federation functionaries, which use the liberal framework and the tolerance of the liberal condition, in order to implement totalitarian opinions of state and religion in its enclaves; those the rules of right-national writingness undermine, with anti-western Indoktrination Scharia oriented instruction give and the standards of the democracy – like Koedukation, Sexualunterricht, sport, class travels, sex equality – refuse.
I will persist also further in my cultural self-determination, in a way of life, which my is and which does not agree in manifold regard with the Muslim. And I want to be allowed to say, undisturbed. I want to be allowed to say that I don’t want to meet Burka or chadorwearing veiled females on German roads neither, nor do I want to hear the call of the Muezzin from huge Minarets near me. Also I want to be allowed to object publicly over the fact that the European Union allowed a Turkish minister of foreign affairs to let his daughters study in Germany, because they can do here, what in Turkey is officially forbidden to go i.e. unhindered with the head cloth into the lecture. Whereby I will please the executive committees of most Muslim federations in Germany, under it the Ditib, not for clearing-up, because I from this side nothing when masking expects.
I will also not adapt my opinion of liberty of opinion to an Ungeist, which lays her out in such a way: “All do not have the right to express their opinion freely in a way those the Scharia contrary-run.” No and three times no! The Scharia, the law Islam, is notoriously Basic Law adverse (unconstitutional), a scandalous anachronism, the fossil of an outdated mankind epoch and a heavy obstacle on the way to the reformation and modernization Islam. It is included by me just as naturally into the critical method as the Koran, the biography Mohammeds and old persons and the new will. And I want to say, write, to think may – official Fatwa threat, unofficial ago.
Where are we that we would have to consider ourselves, whether our doing and acting please radical Muslims or not? Where are we that we could be prescribed in hurrying ahead obedience of religious and other fanatics, what we say may or not? Where are we, dasswir into the knees go before those obviously at any time from any local Imamen callable Islamic anger and indignation collectives between Cairo and ball, how the controversy over the Danish “Mohammed caricatures” demonstrated them us? I am überdrüssig the traditions, habits and habits, each criticism in offenses umfälschen,
even however with insults against Andersgläubige to the hand are most wasteful.
I resist a blackmail-potential, which wants to hold us under Islamic rule and its tentakels from central and interior Asia into the center of Europe ejected: Those who do not submit live dangerously! Am I to now be silent and to betray all my fought for and suffered criteria, because also with murder one threatened to me? What, Germania, ran here wrongly that today must be asked in such a way? Thus I on that professional Multikulti Illusionisten, xenophile lawyers come from the left liberal corner, like Hans Chrisian Ströbele and Claudia Roth, merciless deniers of justified self-interests of the majority company and large those any realistic estimate of the situation of the immigrant problem – they are to be kept in the eye. I stand for this name anyhow at the side all secularized mash lima and Muslime, who want to free the way to an integration with reforms, earned – a goal, from which we are still far distant. Which does not prevent me to bring it with my molecule more near. Because a peaceful alternative to integration does not exist.