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Sunday, January 25, 2009
Guantanamo “something beyond a travesty”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a prosecutor with well over a hundred criminal jury trials under his belt, was assigned in May 2007 to prosecute the case of Mohammed Jawed, a Gitmo prisoner, in the military commissions established by the Bush administration.
It was a job that Vandeveld accepted and pursued eagerly as a patriotic American. However, as he looked into the specifics of the case assigned to him, the colonel became appalled.
He learned that Jawed had been arrested in his native Afghanistan at the age of 15 or 16 and charged with throwing a hand grenade that had injured U.S. soldiers. But in the six years Jawad had been held, the military had made no attempt to examine or even compile the alleged evidence against him. Vandeveld discovered scraps of supposed evidence scattered in desk drawers, bookcases, tossed on empty desks or even thrown into a locker and forgotten. The story he tells makes it clear that the military had no real interest in Jawed’s guilt or innocence.
The most damning piece of evidence was a handwritten confession supposedly obtained by Afghan police from Jawed before he was turned over to the Americans. But Vandeveld’s faith in that document was shaken when he discovered that Jawed was illiterate, meaning he could not have written or even read that statement. Furthermore, the confession was written in Farsi; Jawed speaks only Pashto.
“It seemed increasingly likely that the statement attributed to Mr. Jawad in his original interrogation had simply been contrived by one of the Afghan policemen, which they then amateurishly sought to ‘authenticate’ by having Jawad place his thumbprint on the document,” Vandeveld concluded.
Vandeveld still continued to press his case, believing that there must be other evidence that Jawad was guilty. But he began to have reservations about the propriety of prosecuting an adolescent as a war criminal. His confidence was shaken further when Jawad claimed to have been beaten and abused by the U.S. military.
Vandeveld initially dismissed that claim as ludicrous; he believed in the probity of his colleagues in uniform, and he knew that al Qaida teaches its members to make such claims. “We accepted as an article of faith that the detainees either fabricated outright or grossly exaggerated their seemingly continual complaints of abuse,” he said.
Vandeveld also personally assumed, “based on media reports, that a small number of detainees had been subjected to less than congenial interrogation tactics, but only because the interrogators had some basis to believe that such detaineees possessed intelligence critical to our efforts to disrupt and destroy al Qaeda.”
Vandeveld was confident that a mere Afghan teenager, a boy who was at worst just a simple foot soldier in al Qaida with only a few weeks of experience in the group, would not have been treated that way. Torture and abuse were surely reserved for those who had important information that they refused to divulge.
But the prosecutor quickly discovered evidence to the contrary — the abuse was far more common that he had allowed himself to believe. At one point, for example, young Jawad had been denied sleep for two straight weeks; it damaged him so deeply that he later tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall. Other evidence supported Jawad’s claim that he had been physically assaulted by U.S. soldiers and shoved down a stairwell while hooded and handcuffed.
Eventually, Col. Vandeveld came to a troubling conclusion: Jawad was innocent and should be released immediately.
“It is my opinion, based on my extensive knowledge of the case, that there is no credible evidence or legal basis to justify Mr. Jawad’s detention in U.S. custody or his prosecution by military commission,” Vandeveld wrote in a signed, sworned statement taken two weeks ago. “There is, however, reliable evidence that he was badly mistreated by U.S. authorities both in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, and he has suffered, and continues to suffer, great psychological harm. Holding Mr. Jawad for over six years, with no resolution of his case and with no terminus in sight, is something beyond a travesty.”
“Even a statement that we believed linked him to (a terrorist group) and was thought to contain Mr. Jawad’s fingerprint was sent to the Army’s crime lab for analysis, which concluded that the fingerprint was not Mr. Jawad’s,” Vandeveld wrote.
Vandeveld tried to make those arguments within the military justice system but got nowhere. He eventually concluded that even if he got the charges against Jawad dismissed, the Bush administration “would continue to hold Mr. Jawad indefinitely as an enemy combatant, no matter the paucity or unreliability of the evidence asserted against him.”
So in September 2008, Vandeveld resigned in frustration. Now in civilian life, he is supporting a legal effort to get Jawad freed through U.S. civilian courts.
“I have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I remain confident that I have done so, spending over four of the past seven years away from my family, my home, my civilian occupation (as deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania) — all without any expectation of or desire for any reward greater than that the knowledge that I have remained true to my word and have done my level best to rise to our nation’s defense in its time of need,” the colonel wrote in his statement, noting that two of his friends had been killed in combat and “one of my very best friends in the world had been terribly wounded.”
But if he met Jawad in Iraq or Afghanistan, “I have no doubt at all — none — that Mr. Jawad would pose no threat whatsoever to me, his former prosecutor and now-repentent persecutor. Six years is long enough for a boy of 16 to serve in virtual solitary confinement in a distant land for reasons he may never fully understand.”
Mohammed Jawed, one of the “worst of the worst,” remains in Guantanamo.
(h/t Washingtonmonthly.com)
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A good cup ‘o mental health
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.
A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.”
So excuse me while I enjoy a cup or two of mental health. I think some of you out there ought to take up the habit too — you know, to ward off dementia.
But it’s clearly too late for some of you.
