Could someone please explain to me why a story this important is running in GQ Magazine?
Don't get me wrong. I like GQ. But shouldn't something like this get a much wider audience?
William Kuebler, a navy lieutenant with clippered hair and a round face, sat in his crisp summer whites at a heavy wooden table in the courtroom at Guantánamo Bay. To his left, at the other end of the table, was a young Saudi named Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi, who was reputed to be one of the most dangerous terrorists on the planet. Al Sharbi was about to be tried for war crimes, and Kuebler was supposed to defend him....
“It took me a while to figure out the system is rigged,” Bill Kuebler was saying one day last spring, more than a year after he’d been ordered to defend a man against his will. “When it hit me how ridiculous and unjust and farcical this is? That was it. That was the moment I realized it was all a sham.”Kuebler is not a radical or a gadfly or even a liberal. He is, rather, a conservative Republican and devout Christian, a husband and father, who left a lucrative career as a civil litigator to join the navy and serve his country at the relatively late age of 28. When he’s not in uniform he favors buttoned-up polo shirts and khakis, which make him look like an office manager or perhaps an insurance adjuster. And when he speaks—when he accuses his government of rigging military tribunals to the point of farce, of mocking the basic rule of law he swore to uphold—he does so with all the passion of an office manager discussing, say, the supply of ink cartridges and paper clips: drily and succinctly, as if he is making statements of fact no more or less obvious than the color of the sky...
“Over time,” Kuebler says, “we figured out we’re the linchpin in this process. They want to have these bizarre trials, they don’t want to let the defendant see secret evidence—so the one thing they need is us. The government wanted this attorney-client thing to work. They really did. It’s an important part of the show.”
“Only the government benefits if we do a bang-up job,” Fleener [a second JAG interviewed for this piece] says. “The administration believes the commission process will ultimately justify the detentions. They know they can’t just hold people; they don’t want to take the political heat. So they rigged the rule of law. And because it’s rigged, the only thing that’s in play is the appearance.” And the detainees know it, which is why they don’t want to go along with a charade. “At the end of the day,” he says, “that’s how these guys look at it: ‘If I’m going to get a life sentence—or a death sentence—I’d rather get one in this weird, disgusting system that everyone knows is a weird, disgusting system than have some military lawyer up there dancing and juicing it up and making it look like it’s not rigged.’ ”
Or take, for example, this fact:
Only 5 percent [of the detainees at Gitmo] were captured by U.S. forces, whereas 86 percent were either captured by Pakistanis (including al Sharbi) or grabbed by the Northern Alliance when the United States was papering Afghanistan with bounty notices.
I have never - not once - seen that fact reported elsewhere. And its not as if it is an insignificant fact.
Or take this simple, straightforward explanation of the system of "justice" that we have set up to "try" the detainees:
The main problem with the commission system is that it would try men already considered guilty: Every defendant would have been ruled an enemy combatant, first by the mere fact of his detention, then by a separate board, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal—and he would be charged with a crime only an enemy combatant could commit. (“Conspiracy to commit murder by an unprivileged belligerent” is just a clunkier way of calling a man an unlawful enemy combatant.) The charge would only reinforce what had already been decided; the presumption of innocence would be completely reversed.
The trial procedures were no better. Defendants wouldn’t see classified evidence against them, including anything that fell under the broad rubric of “sources and methods”—or, more simply, how statements were gathered and from whom. That obviously could include the benign, such as protecting the identity of an informant, yet it also clearly suggested that evidence derived from torture could be allowed while the actual torturing would be kept secret. If, for example, John Doe had been waterboarded until he claimed that Mike Smith was a terrorist, Mike Smith would know only that “a source” had positively identified him, though not who or under what conditions. The accused also could be removed from his own trial whenever the presiding officer decided national security needed to be protected, and the rules tolerating hearsay testimony were so loose as to be meaningless. Any fifth-hand mumblings could be used against a man, and he would have no effective ability to challenge them.“In practice the commissions dispense with two indispensable legal protections—the presumption of innocence and the prevention of ex post facto application of criminal laws,” Fleener says. “What we’re saying is, ‘You are guilty of something—we just don’t know exactly what. So we’ll gather as much incriminating evidence as we can, using methods that we aren’t going to talk about, and then we’ll make up a law that criminalizes the conduct.’ ”
It isn't as if I don't already know this stuff. It's just that I've never seen it explained quite so clearly. And if I haven't, its likely most Americans haven't either.
And what about this?
“Can you imagine,” Fleener says, “if people came out and did the exact same shit we just did? Except brown people did it?” At that moment, imagining such a thing took no effort at all: Iran was holding fifteen British sailors and marines after seizing them off the coast of Iraq. “Would we get ripshit if Iran does to the Brits what we’ve done to al Sharbi and al Bahlul?”
Kuebler nods. “Yes.”
Fleener goes further. “I think more war crimes have been committed in the detention and interrogation and fake trials of people in Guantánamo than people in Guantánamo have committed,” he says. “And I don’t think the question is whether they’ve tortured people.”
Kuebler considers that for a moment. He’s the more reserved of the two, less animated, the one who Fleener says “brings substance to my outrage.” After a bit, he slowly dips his chin, then raises it. “I think things have been done to people,” he says, “that under any definition except this administration’s very narrow one would be torture.”
Andrew is right: The only way you can still believe the lies they are telling you is if you aren't paying attention or don't want to know the truth. But self-government hinges entirely on citizens actively seeking the truth about their world on a near constant basis. We may wish to look away, but we cannot.
All in your name. All to protect you and your family.
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