Comments:General who oversaw military tribunals at Guantanamo is being investigated for abuse of power

= Do you believe Brigadier General Hartmann abused power? =

Guantanamo is a stain on the American flag. Theres no doubt he abused his power, as Guantanamo in itself is an abuse of Americas power. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.213.255.137 (talk) 18:28, 1 November 2008 (UTC)


 * The ACLU and the liberals that defend the Terrorist are the stain on the American Flag —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.229.21.217 (talk) 01:28, 2 November 2008 (UTC)


 * So let me get this right, the ACLU, upholding the actual rights of people are the ones acting against the U.S.? So is it back to "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." again already? To actively destroy the things the nation was created for while claiming to protect it is shameful. 65.1.135.117 04:01, 2 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Fair trials don't only protect those charged with crimes. They protect the general public.  Show trials, that unfairly convict innocent men, leave the guilty at large, they curtail the search for the actual guilty parties.  66.229.21.217, no one has suggested the truly guilty go free.  But we don't know who they are.  While some politically partisan observers, and politically partisan officers, like Hartmann, Geoffrey Miller and Harry Harris, have assured the public that everyone held in Guantanamo was guilty, the thounsands of pages of documents the DoD has published from their Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not establish that.  Contrary to claims by partisans, the allegations filed against the captives in their Summary of Evidence memos establish that only a small fraction of the captives could be described as being "captured on the battlefield" -- for any meaningful definition of battlefield.  And, in my personal opinion, the documents make pretty clear that a big share of that small fraction who were captured on or near a battlefield were merely innocent bystanders.


 * The public will be much safer if the captives are given fair trials. Fair trials provide a kind of sanity checking of the allegations against suspects.  And the allegations used to justify the detention of the captives show that this sanity checking has been desperately needed this last seven years.  A few examples:
 * Over a hundred captives faced the allegation that their name, or "known alias", was found on a suspicious list. But many of these captives real names only vaguely resembled the names the USA held them under.
 * A little publicized fact is that the Guantanamo authorities were unwilling or unable to figure out how the captives real names. Arabic and Pashtun names are tricky to transcribe into a English.  And the evidence suggests the Guantanamo authorities simply couldn't be bothered to do a competent job of it.
 * Back in 2004 the Bush administration started to claim that some former Guantanamo captives had tricked their way out of detention, that they had been Taliban leaders. One of the men they named they called "Mullah Shahzada".  What the documents show, however, is that there were two captives interrogators thought was a Taliban leader named "Mullah Shahzada".  One of them was a school-teacher, who had lived out the Taliban regime in Pakistan, who had a cast-iron alibi.  During the seven years this guy was accused of being the senior Taliban intelligence officer in Mazari Sharif his time cards and pay stubs would show he was a high school teacher in Pakistan.  By mid-2003, with the help of Red Cross observers, he received enough letters to establish he was not Mullah Shahzada, the Taliban leader.  But, what did the Guantanamo authorities do?  Their unwillingness to effectively maintain a single set of records for each captive meant that they released the wrong guy -- the one who actually was a Taliban leader.  The innocent guy remained in Guantanamo for another four years.
 * Or consider Abdullah Khan. He was denounced by Afghan criminals seeking the substantial bounties the USA hands out for information leading to the capture of members of the Taliban.  They told the highly credulous American intelligence officers that Abdullah Khan was really Khirullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban's Governor of Herat.  Khan has testified that his interrogators kept insisting he was lying about his identity, that they knew he was really Khirullah Khairkhwa.  When he arrived in Guantanamo other captives told him that the Americans had captured the real Khirullah Khairkhwa a year and a half before his capture, and that Khairkhwa was also being held in Guantanamo, just a few hundred yards away.  When his interrogators insisted he was really Khirullah Khairkhwa, he testified he pleaded with them to check the prison roster, so they could see they already held the real Khirullah Khairkhwa.  It took him almost three years to be repatriated, and the Guantanamo authorities never acknowledged he was not Khirullah.
 * Or consider fourteen year old Mohammed Al Guarani -- captured in Pakistan in 2001. He was accused of being one of the lieutenants of Abu Qatada, in the 1990s, an imam in London who was alleged to be associated al Qaeda.  His School records show he was attending Primary School in Saudi Arabia at the time he was accused of being a suspicious radical in London.


 * The military failed to bring sanity checking to the allegations. Public safety demands we let the courts provide that sanity checking.  Geo Swan (talk) 14:02, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

The entire military tribunal at Guantanamo is an illegal abuse of power. This case is merely military housekeeping - who didn't salute whom. It does nothing to address the outrageous reality: The U.S. now holds about 255 men at Guantanamo, and says that it expects to file war crimes charges against about 80 of them. This is not the justice that we should aspire to as Americans. This is the real abuse of power. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.232.113.186 (talk) 20:24, 2 November 2008 (UTC)