The Trib Editorial Board Lies About Torture

In an op-ed at the today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Scaife's braintrust omits a fundamental fact in it's discussion on the Ghailani verdict.

We've written about this before but I want to dive straight into the Trib's deception:

Conviction of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee linked to al-Qaida's 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on just one of 285 counts -- conspiracy to destroy U.S. property -- proves the naivete (or is it idiocy?) of the Obama administration trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts.

The judge's exclusion of a key witness -- because that witness had been identified while Ahmed Ghailani, 36, was in a secret CIA prison where harsh interrogation techniques were used -- hampered the prosecution in federal court in Lower Manhattan.

The reason Trib wants you to believe that the reason that "key witness" was excluded (because "that witness had been identified while Ahmed Ghailani, 36, was in a secret CIA prison where harsh interrogation techniques were used") is where their deception is found.

And how do I know this? Let's take a look at Judge Kaplan's order. First the set-up:

The question presented by this motion is whether the government may use in this criminal trial the testimony of a witness whom the government obtained only through information it allegedly extracted by physical and psychological abuse of the defendant. The government has elected not to litigate the details of what was done to the defendant. Instead, it has asked the Court to assume for purposes of the motion that everything the defendant said was coerced in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Accordingly this decision, at the government's behest, prooeeds on that premise. (page 4)

Kaplan goes onto say that Ghailani was subjected to "enhanced interrogation methods and other allegedly abusive treatment" and that Ghailani gave them the information that led them to the "key witness" Hussein Abebe." On top of that, the then government wanted to call Abebe to testify against Ghailani. (page 5). The judge concluded that that's a violation of the 5th Amendment.

Now look back at how the Trib characterized it. They left out the part that it was Ghailani who identified the Abebe AND they left out the part that he did it after being tortured enhancedly interrogated. All you get from the Trib is that Abebe was identified while Ghailani was at a place where people were being tortured enhancedly interrogated.

How's that for deception? You'd like to think that a "news" organization wouldn't lie to you that blatantly but this is the Trib op-ed page where honesty is a rare commodity.

But the braintrust isn't done. No sirree Bob! Here's the next paragraph:

Thus, an indisputable miscarriage of justice resulted from court-granted protection that Mr. Ghailani -- an enemy combatant, not a U.S. citizen -- didn't deserve and wouldn't have received from a military tribunal at Gitmo.

They're saying that had Ghailani been tried in a military tribunal the coerced information would have been allowed and the terrorist would have been found guilty of even more crimes.

Not so fast.

Take a look at this footnote from Kaplan's order (h/t to mediamatters):

It is very far from clear that Abebe's testimony would be admissible if Ghailani were being tried by military commission, even without regard to the question whether the Fifth Amendment would invalidate any more forgiving provisions of the rules of evidence otherwise applicable in such a proceeding.

Military commissions are governed by the Military Commissions Act, 10 USC 948a et seq. (the "MCA"). Evidence in such proceedings is governed by the Military Commission Rules of Evidence ("MCRE"). U.S. DEP'T OF DEFENSE, MANUAL FOR MILITARY COMMISSIONS (2010 ed.).

MCA 948r(a) and MCRE 304 preclude or restrict the use of "statements obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," and evidence derived threrefrom, and could require exclusion of Abebe's testimony. Even if they did not, the Constitution might do so, even in a military commission proceeding.

Mediamatters even links back to the MCA to do something the Trib refuses to do - show the evidence supporting their position:

No statement, obtained by the use of torture, or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment (as defined by section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd)), whether or not under color of law, shall be admissible in a trial by military commission, except against a person accused of torture or such treatment as evidence that the statement was made.

None of which, of course, made it into the Trib's editorial.

Such a short editorial. So much misinformation. Par for the course for Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review.

Another Reason Why Torture Is A Bad Idea

Take a look at the Ghailani Verdict:

Fierce criticism erupted Thursday over the split verdict on terrorism charges against the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in civilian court, casting new doubts on the Obama administration’s goal of trying cases against other prisoners in the civilian criminal justice system.

The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was convicted Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan of conspiring in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and he faces a sentence of 20 years to life in prison. But Republican critics roundly denounced the fact that a jury acquitted him on all but one of more than 280 charges — including every murder count — as a sign that such terrorism detainees should be prosecuted only before a military commission.

That portrayal of the verdict as a disaster was hotly contested by the administration and other supporters of civilian trials. They argued that the system had shown that a terrorist could be convicted and sentenced to a stiff prison term even after a judge excluded evidence tainted by coercive interrogations during the Bush administration.

See that? They euphemized "torture" to "coercive interrogations." When they do it it's torture; when we do it it's "coercive interrogations." Damned lib-rul media!

So what's the problem?

Many observers attributed any weakness in the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness, who was discovered after interrogators used coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani.

So evidence based on torture was deemed inadmissible. That, of course enraged the law and order types on the right. Military tribunals wouldn't have this problem, they said.

Not so:

But proponents of civilian trials noted that in a footnote of his order rejecting the witness, Judge Kaplan pointed to restrictions against evidence obtained by torture in military trials and strongly suggested that a military judge would have excluded the testimony, too.

So, apart from the immorality of Bush's torture, apart from the illegality of Bush's torture, there's another reason why torture is bad. Bad, bad, bad.

From Andrew Sullivan:

The only thing to say about the remarkable acquittals on almost all counts for a tortured prisoner of war is that torture renders convictions all but impossible. By throwing aside all norms for prisoner treatment and setting up an apparatus of systemic torture, Bush and Cheney destroyed critical evidence that could have been used by the prosecution to convict. [emphases added.]

In their zeal to "git 'em!" Bush and Cheney made things much much more complicated. They could have just followed the law but they didn't. They broke it. And now the only alternative is detaining the accused terrorists indefinitely without trial. Another insult to our Constitutional system.

This is the Bush/Cheney legacy: torture followed by indefinite detention. So much for the rule of law.