Surprised?

Today's installment in the continuing series of revelations from people on the inside that things were indeed as bad as reasonable people have been suspecting for some time:

WASHINGTON -- An Army reserve officer who served on a military panel at Guantanamo Bay that determined whether a detainee should be held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" has said the process is deeply flawed, relying on vague evidence prepared by poorly trained personnel, and is subject to undue pressure from the military chain of command, according to an affidavit unsealed yesterday.

In the first account of the miltary review process by a participant, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham wrote that when he and two other officers assigned to serve on the tribunal concluded that a detainee should not be classified as an "enemy combatant," his superiors in charge of the process forced him to reopen the hearing so the government could present more evidence.

After they reconsidered the case but refused to reverse their decision, he wrote, their superiors questioned them in follow-up meetings about "what went wrong" with the case. Abraham was never asked to serve on another panel, according to the affidavit.

I guess, if you are running a kangaroo court, you want to make sure you don't end up with merely a wombat court, or god forbid, innocent men.

The online source TPMmuckraker has more details:

Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham was assigned to the Defense Department's Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) for six months in 2004 and 2005. In that capacity, Abraham worked closely with the administrative process known as a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) -- the one-time, non-legal hearing for Guantanamo detainees that establishes whether or not a detainee should be considered an enemy combatant fit for prolonged detention. Specifically, Abraham's role was to coordinate with intelligence agencies in and outside of the Defense Department to "gather or validate information" suitable to the CSRTs. And there, Abraham found that the CSRT process is skewed toward keeping detainees at Guantanamo.

In his declaration, obtained by TPMmuckraker, Abraham charges that the officers tasked with gathering information on a detainee -- known as a Recorder or a Case Writer -- typically have "little training or experience" in intelligence. The fact files they compile are most often "outdated, often 'generic,' (and) rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRT," and frequently reliant on a Pentagon database that lacked information from across the intelligence community. "This limitation," Abraham writes, "was frequently not understood by individuals with access to or who relied upon the system as a source of information."

Throughout the process, Abraham discovered that officers attempting to comply with CSRT rules to present exculpatory information were frequently obstructed. When he attempted to gather information on a detainee from an intelligence agency aside from a package prepared from him, he was told that no additional information would be forthcoming. An attorney for one intelligence agency refused to certify that no exculpatory information was being withheld. On other occasions, intelligence agencies would overload the intelligence-illiterate Recorders and Case Writers with files, leaving them with "no context for determining whether the information was relevant or probative."

During one CSRT, Abraham found the evidence suggesting one detainee was an enemy combatant "lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence."

Statements allegedly made by percipient witnesses lacked detail. Reports presented generalized statements in indirect and passive forms without stating the source of the information or providing a basis for establishing the reliability or the credibility of the source. Statements of the interrogators presented to the panel offered inferences from which we were expected to draw conclusions favoring a finding of "enemy combatant" from the Recorder...

When Abraham's team ultimately recommended that the detainee was improperly classified, the then-head of OARDEC, Rear Admiral James McGarrah, ordered the CSRT reopened, "to allow the Recorder to present further argument as to why the detainee should be classified as an enemy combatant." And what do you think happened to Abraham after that?

I was not assigned to another CSRT panel.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department this week announced it was transferring a new suspect to Guantanamo.