We all know the story by now. Panicked by the consequences of dismissing the threat of international terrorism as hoohaw ginned up by the "Democrat CIA", and disdainful of even the most fundamental human rights required by democracy, Bush and Cheney's response to the attacks on 9/11/2001 was to "work the dark side." Kidnapping, torture, coercion, collective punishment, indefinite imprisonment, assassination-- nothing would be off the table. Anyone who objected was marginalized; many had their careers ruined; many more were held up for public ridicule as cowards, traitors, "soft on terror".

Before we begin let me just say it plainly: DIck Cheney is a madman and a tyrant. Only a madman declares that a one-percent risk demands a preemptive 100% response. Only a tyrant declares himself to be above the law and beyond the reach of ethical limits.

There is no better example of Cheney's tyrannical madness than the gulag at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and no more damning departure from our founding traditions than the so-called legal system that has been created there. Imagine: you are scooped up off the street by agents a foreign power, tortured, shipped thousands of miles from home, denied access to friends, family, anyone you've ever known; then, years later, you are dragged before a panel of foreign military offices who are there to determine your "status" and thereby decide whether you can be imprisoned for life with no hope of ever proving your innocence. You are not allowed a lawyer but are given a "personal representative" who works for the same military that is trying you in the first place. You are not permitted to see the evidence against you and you cannot call witnesses in your own defense. Such was the nature of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals held for 558 prisoners at GITMO in 2004 and 2005.

From the outside, these tribunals were mostly a mystery; we have had little more than rosy official government pronouncements about their "fairness" to go on.

Until last Friday, that is.

First, from the AP wire:

An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees "enemy combatants," often without any specific evidence. His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held. Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only "generic" material that didn't hold up to the most basic legal challenges. Despite repeated requests, intelligence agencies arbitrarily refused to provide specific information that could have helped either side in the tribunals, according to Abraham, who said he served as a main liaison between the Combat Status Review Tribunals and those intelligence agencies. "What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence," Abraham said in the affidavit, filed in a Washington appeals court on behalf of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, who is challenging his classification as an "enemy combatant."

To summarize: a 26-year veteran of Army intel, a man hand-picked to sit on one of the super-secret three-member panels and who acted as the middleman between those panels and the intelligence community just filed an affidavit in the DC Court on behalf of one of the prisoners.

Recall that 558 prisoners were brought before these tribunals. The Washington Post reports that, of those, 520 were found to be "enemy combatants" who should continue to be held in Bush and Cheney's legal limbo. That's a 93 percent. Surely the government's cases must have been bulletproof, right? According to Abraham, not so much:

In his affidavit, Abraham said there was considerable pressure from commanders for officers serving on the tribunals to determine that detainees were enemy fighters. He also said that it was "well known" that those officers who concluded otherwise would have to explain their findings to McGarrah and his top aides. He said he and two fellow panel members were closely questioned by McGarrah and his deputy after they decided that there was not enough evidence to conclude that a prisoner was an enemy fighter, and were then ordered to hold an expanded hearing to reconsider their conclusion.

The AP makes the same point this way:

Abraham was asked to serve on one of the panels, and he said its members felt strong pressure to find against the detainee, saying there was "intensive scrutiny" when they declared a prisoner not to be an enemy combatant. When his panel decided the detainee wasn't an "enemy combatant," they were ordered to reconvene to hear more evidence, he said.

This is the same behavior we've seen from this administration in many areas from the pre-Iraq War intel to scientific reports about climate change: give them an answer they don't like-- no matter how factual-- and they send you back to "look again" until you come back with the "right" answer. Those who stick by what they know is right are marginalized, and those who go on to take their complaints to the public are smeared and degraded. And that's just what's happening with Lt. Col. Abraham.

First the marginalization:

Ultimately, [Lt. Col. Abraham's] panel held its ground, and he was never asked to participate in another tribunal, he said.

Then the smear:

Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday that the tribunal process is "fair, rigorous and robust." Two defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Abraham does not have sufficient experience to give an authoritative account of the process, having served on just one review panel.

Nice bit of circular logic there, no? "We pushed him out for not playing ball so you shouldn't listen to him when he says he was pushed out for not playing ball."

Travesty morphs into total absurdity when you connect this story to the recent findings that these tribunals may be moot in the first place since they declared those 550 souls "enemy combatants" when, per the god-awful Military Commissions Act, Cheney, Inc.'s legal limbo only applies "unlawful enemy combatants".

Think about that for a minute: they went to all the trouble of creating a new classification of enemy for which the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions don't apply, set up a star chamber to stick that made-up label on people they were already holding in prison, and then didn't even get the labels right in the finding from their little custom-made extra-legal courts. Its Kafka meets the Three Stooges.

It didn't have to be this way. Those involved in attacking the US on 9/11/2001 could have been tried and convicted as the criminal murderers they are. Those captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan could have been rightly held as prisoners of war. But no. We have a tyrannical madman at the helm of our national security policy and a dimbulb president who is too weak and too stuck in his own messianic fantasy world to ever reign him in.

Kudos to Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham for standing up and speaking the truth. Congress must finally step in and end this madness and getting Abraham on the record in an open hearing seems to be the next logical step.

smintheus has more at unbossed.