Why habeas corpus Makes Sense

Take the case of Mohammed Aktiar, brought to us by McClatchy:

American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Imagine that a powerful army invades your nation, full of righteous anger but without any deep understanding of your people or the pre-existing local conflicts. Some neighbor or rival in the tribal hierarchy or other grudge-holding scumbag decides to improve his situation by lying about you to the strangers. They, being both ignorant and anxious to triumph, let their gullibility rule, and they come to your home, dragging you away in the night. They take you away, not just from your home and village and tribe, but even your country and continent. You are thrown into a Kafkaesque world of interrogations and violence, and detained for years, thousands of miles from home, with no hope of ever even getting a chance to tell someone who might care that you are not, in fact, the person they think you are.

Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.

The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.

"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.

Despite the claim of the President that the people in Guantanamo are "the worst of the worst", and the rabid claims of various GOP luminaries including Justice Scalia, the truth of Guantanamo is different. It has been and continues as one of the most hideous and shameful episodes in American history, in which our leaders enthusiastically and self-righteously abandoned both one of the fundamental principles of human (not just American) rights and the fundamental principles of common sense.

For a nation soaked in capitalism, we were remarkably oblivious to the predictable effect of simple economics:

The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds.

A minority of detainees were arrested directly by American forces. Yet the administration and their supporters in Congress have repeatedly spoken authoritatively and angrily of them as the enemy, and evil, and the worst, as if this was established fact, and to suggest otherwise was vaguely traitorous. Yet in truth we've known only what we paid some gunman in a poor, war-torn country to tell us about them.

American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.

Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.

Contrary to candidate John McClain's claim earlier this week, the recent Supreme Court decision is hardly "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Rather, it may be seen to be one of the best, a critical turning back toward the values that made our nation the envy of the world.

That John McCain sees it otherwise is all one needs to know to vote against him in November.