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‘Model Society’ Can’t Ignore Its Own Rules of Law

By Carl Hiaasen
The Miami Herald
September 10, 2006
 
The controversial terrorist prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, finally has some big-time terrorist suspects.
 
Last week, 14 alleged al Qaeda operatives were transferred to Gitmo from secret CIA lockups around the world. Among the detainees is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be a major player behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
 
He's by far the biggest fish that the United States has caught so far in the campaign against terrorism, and it was precisely for the likes of him that the prison at Guantánamo Bay was established.
 
Until now, it's been used as a high-end gulag for smaller fry and lots of nonterrorists -- some of them held for years -- who'd been rounded up in the early days of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
 
Over time, scores of anonymous detainees have been quietly released and sent back to their countries after it was determined that they posed no threat.
 
While the Guantánamo operation has become an international scandal, the reaction here at home remains muted. If it had been American citizens imprisoned without charges in another country, the uproar would be deafening.
 
But these were mostly foreign-born Muslims, nameless and faceless to us, and we preferred to believe that our government had the goods on them. It was uncomfortable to imagine that some detainees might not be terrorists at all, but rather innocent fathers and husbands and brothers whose freedom had been wrongly snatched away.
 
Tough luck, some would say. It's their fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
President Bush himself ordered the transfer of the 14 suspected al Qaeda heavyweights to Guantánamo. He's trying to pressure Congress into granting authorization to prosecute the men at military tribunals, under rules similar to those rejected last summer by the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
Hearsay evidence
 
If Bush gets his way, the tribunals would allow the admission of evidence obtained by coercion and hearsay, and would deny defendants and their lawyers the right to see classified information that was being used against them.
 
You think Scooter Libby would go for a trial like that? Not likely.
 
The problem with hearsay evidence is that it's often wrong, because witnesses will lie at the drop of a hat to implicate others and save their own hides.
 
The problem with coerced evidence is that people will sometimes admit to crimes they didn't really commit, in order to stop the coercion.
 
The five teens arrested in 1989 for that horrific attack on a Central Park jogger all confessed to detectives after prolonged and intense interrogation. Unfortunately, they were innocent -- cleared by genetic testing 13 years after the crime.
 
In fact, in many DNA exoneration cases, the wrongly convicted person had confessed, under pressure, to the crime.
 
Abusive techniques
 
Plenty of valuable information has come from skillful interrogations, but abusive techniques have been denounced by many intelligence experts as well as members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain, who was brutalized as a POW in North Vietnam.
 
For handling suspected terrorists, the Bush administration makes a legal distinction between coercion and torture of the sort that occured at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
 
A new Army Field Manual calls for humane treatment of terrorist suspects, and prohibits certain harsh tactics. For example, detainees are not to be beaten, shocked with electric devices or forced to perform sexual acts.
 
Also disallowed are mock executions and waterboarding, a practice in which a detainee is strapped to a board and held underwater until he believes he's drowning.
 
Some people don't see anything wrong with that, but they're missing the big picture.
 
Yes, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is a murderous fiend who despises all Americans. For his role in 9/11, he deserves to be roasted for eternity upon his own private barbecue spit in hell.
 
But there's nothing to be gained for the United States by torturing creeps like him and using their forced confessions in a show trial. It's just stealing a page from the old playbooks of Stalin and Mao.
 
Thanks to the bloody debacle in Iraq, our credibility is shot in the volatile Muslim nations, and beyond. Instead of being praised as liberators, we're condemned as arrogant warmongers.
 
Even if coalition forces bailed out of Baghdad tomorrow, repairing our international image might require decades of delicate diplomacy.
 
In the meantime, it's futile to present ourselves as the model of a just and civilized society if we throw out our rules of law -- including the presumption of innocence -- when dealing with suspected terrorists.
 
In theory, what separates us from the monsters we're fighting is a commitment to freedom and human rights. But a model democracy isn't supposed to imprison a person for years without charges or a fair trial. A model democracy isn't supposed to condone beating admissions out of a suspect.
 
The ranks of al Qaeda are full of truly dangerous people who should be locked up forever, if not executed. The key is to catch the right ones, and prosecute them the right way.
 
Unfortunately, getting things right has not been a hallmark of this administration's war on terror. Now would be a good time to start, since the whole world is watching.

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