If Mohamed can become Josef, why not Joe Schmo?

21 June 2010 | InfoShop News

Mohamed Hassan Odaini﻿, a Yemeni sent by his family to study in Pak, was kidnapped by the Islamabad government in 2002. He was 17 at the time and transferred to the captivity of the U.S. government at Guantánamo Bay, where he remains today. Though, the Obama Administration has no evidence to support justification of this prolonged kidnapping, it continuously fights hard in courts to block detainees from confronting their captors, Glenn Greenwald writes today at Salon [emphasis his]:

A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence “overwhelmingly supports Odaini’s contention that he is unlawfully detained.” Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years — beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 — when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court’s description of that history). Despite that, the Obama administration has refused to release him for the past 16 months, and fought vehemently in this habeas proceeding to keep him imprisoned. As the court put it, the Obama DOJ argued “vehemently” that there was evidence that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda. In fact, the Obama administration knew this was false. This Washington Post article this weekend quotes an “administration official” as saying: “The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid.” But after Obama decreed in January that no Yemeni detainees would be released — even completely innocent ones, and even though the Yemeni government wants their innocent prisoners returned — Obama DOJ lawyers basically lied to the court by claiming there was substantial evidence to prove that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda even though they know that is false. In other words, the Obama administration is knowingly imprisoning a completely innocent human being who has been kept in a cage in an island prison, thousands of miles from his home, for the last 8 years, since he’s 18 years old, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.

This not only paints the picture displaying this Kafka-esque reality taking shape in the U.S. criminal ‘injustice’ system, but the more dangerous consent being manufactured by the so-called ‘liberal’ elements of the intellectual class, Mr. Greenwald added [emphasis ours]:

The article is a reminder of one written about ten days ago by Mr. Greenwald, where he opines that these efforts by the intellectual class are to create the actions of this president as a default standard of objectivity and the manufacturing of consent by the media is some virtuous form of realism. It’s irrelevant if the status quo is full of lies, cognitive dissonance, cult of personality or outright evil stupidity. It’s the moral application of ‘might is right’; that what is ought to be acceptable simply because it is the policy of the powerful [emphasis ours]:

Because that’s what journalists do who are eager to show how “balanced” and centrist they are. [Marc Ambinder] is correct that the series of habeas defeats for the Government “demolish the myth of the right that all detainees are cutthroat super terrorists” (a view reflected by the constant conflation between “Guantanamo detainee” and “Terrorist,” i.e., the refusal to recognize the distinction between accused Terrorist and Terrorist, as though all detainees are, by definition, Terrorists). But he can’t simply point out that reality negates this belief of the Right, because that would mean he’s being imbalanced, biased and (the greatest sin of all) a non-centrist. So he then has to concoct a totally ludicrous view and attribute it the “left”—and then proceed to mock and criticize it—to prove that he’s in the center, with equal distaste for both extremes, and thus reasonable and pragmatic. That’s what most journalists believe “objectivity” requires, and it’s to be achieved at all costs, including a complete departure from reality.

So what is the reality?

The reality is that when it becomes known that evidence is lacking or non-existent to support detention of those kidnapped overseas, the U.S. Congress dreams up legislation to demand prolonged detention, Andy Worthington—leading journalist on the U.S. government’s kidnapping policies and legal proceedings—recently noted. When unconstitutional, unilateral executive policy becomes federal law, judicial review becomes exponentially more difficult. What Mr. Greenwald screams from the highest mountain, that ought to be the centerpiece of all serious discussion of the functions of government–especially military policy and law enforcement—is that there is a dominant narrative among the ignorant existing as: if you don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

The recent joint-agency executive branch Final Report of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force [.pdf], Mr. Worthington wrote, “was supposed to provide a cogent and definitive analysis of the status of the remaining 181 prisoners, given that it took eleven months to complete”, but “revealed institutional caution, credulity regarding the contributions of the intelligence services, an inability to address fundamental problems with the legislation that authorized President Bush’s detention policies in the first place, and a willingness to bend to the demands of political expediency”. He added [emphasis ours]:

The narrative ought to be: if the U.S. government is adamant about asserting such kidnapping, rendition and torture policies against non-citizens on the other side of the world, what makes an American citizen immune from such treatment? The ignorant beliefs are usually coupled with meanings of what being a citizen of the U.S. means, but to use citizenship as an extension of indemnity is to acknowledge and accept the sovereignty of the U.S. government over the U.S. territory more than any other, not less. This logic leads to arbitrary, indefinite, prolonged detention of U.S. citizens without even valid allegations—let alone, hard evidence—presented before them or in a court of law more justifiable.