The Galloping Beaver - Banned in Guantanamo

We get mail :

Greetings,

Your website is one I have long visited and I was quite surprised when I was visiting Guantanamo last month and I was not allowed to visit your website while at the base. I received a notice that the website was not allowed to be accessed by the "administrator" (military censors) (not an exact quote). I was quite surprised, went to other websites that I thought might be more controversial but had no problem and checked at various times to get on to your website (I was there for almost a week this visit) but I never could get on to your website.

So, please take my congrats….I would consider it an honor to be barred by those thugs!

Best regards,
Candace

H. Candace Gorman

Well ... just ... wow. We at The Beav also consider it an honour to be visited by Guantanamo human and civil rights lawyer Candace Gorman.

Ms. Gorman was successful earlier this year in freeing one of her clients from Guantanamo and maintains The Guantanamo Blog to "provide updates on developments concerning the plight of the detainees, the ongoing injustice of current U.S. detention policies in the "War on Terror" and efforts to hold accountable those men and women responsible for the war crimes".

Today she writes :

Of course Bush only spoke about his joy in waterboarding KSM.....I wonder how he will respond to questions about waterboarding Abu Zubaydah (some 100 times) as the government has now been forced to admit Abu Z was not al-Qaeda or taliban .... just some shmuck who had the misfortune to be captured by my criminal
Government.......

Another recent blog entry asks you to lend your support to a military lawyer who refused to prosecute a man who was tortured into confessing. Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveldis is now at risk of losing his 19 year military career for doing so.

Thanks for making our day, Candace, and for all your fine work defending justice and the rule of law from thugs.

Email published with permission of author.

Canadian reporters banned from Gitmo

Skdadl reports that Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star, Steven Edwards of Canwest, Paul Koring of the Globe & Mail, and Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald have been banned by the US Dept. of Defense from covering any future trials at Gitmo because they divulged the names of two interrogator/witnesses at Omar Khadr's kangaroo pretrial.

Well it's a wee bit late for that, isn't it? Michelle Shephard already published the names and part of an interview with one of those witnesses in The Star nearly two years ago :

"Sgt. Joshua Claus was a slight, blond soldier with little experience and lots of responsibility when he became Khadr's interrogator in the cavernous U.S. prison in Bagram detainees nicknamed "The Barn."

Claus would later be convicted for his role in the death of another detainee at Bagram – an innocent Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar. Claus pleaded guilty to maltreatment and assault in return for a five-month jail sentence in 2005.

During the only interview Claus has granted, he told the Toronto Star any allegations of Khadr's mistreatment were false. "They're trying to imply I'm beating or torturing everybody I ever talked to," Claus said.

This ban means that the very reporters who've been providing such excellent coverage on Omar Khadr for years - Shephard has written a book on it - will not be able to report on his show trial when it finally gets underway.

Skdadl's source at Empty Wheel sums it up :

"So DOD is basically saying that once a reporter agrees to go to Gitmo, they lose the ability to report on stuff they have already reported on."

A week ago the military judge ordered reporters and spectators out of this same Gitmo courtroom while 'classified' video of an interview with Khadr was shown. The reporters adjourned to the media room and watched it on youtube instead.

Murder at Gitmo

HARPER'S MAGAZINE has a frightening report by Scott Horton, titled 'The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle'. According to Scott, the interrogation of 3 prisoners resulted in death by asphyxiation. The U.S. media has been ignoring the problem, but it's not going away, and it's going to turn into one hell of a spicy meatball:

Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

So far, Slate has picked it up, and a growing number of independent US bloggers, as well as the European press. The cover-up reads like a bad Murder She Wrote script. Meanwhile, Omar sits there . . .

Child detainee going home after four years in Gitmo

A child detained in Guantanamo Bay for seven years for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan when he was 14 years old is on his way home after a US Federal Court ruled the government was holding him illegally. His initial confession, obtained under duress, was thrown out by the judge.
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"We are so pleased that this nightmare of abuse and injustice has finally come to an end," said his attorney. "While he can never get back the nearly seven years he was illegally detained and tortured, now he can finally return home to his family, friends and country, and begin to build a normal life."
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The child detainee in question is Mohammed Jawad, now returned to his native Afghanistan thanks to a US Federal Court decision this month. [Yeah, mean trick, I know]
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Gosh, another kid accused of throwing a grenade. Is the US military generally in the habit of accusing the survivors of their raids of throwing grenades, or only when there are US casualties and the possibility of friendly fire?
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Meanwhile back in Canada, our child soldier detained in Guantanamo for seven years for allegedly throwing a grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan when he was 15 - that's Omar Khadr pictured above in the middle the year before his father dumped him in Afghanistan - has not been so lucky because Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the last leader on the planet Earth to support the detaining and abuse of children in Gitmo.
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On August 14, our Federal Court of Appeal upheld a lower court ruling that Ottawa is required to press the US for Khadr's repatriation because CSIS and Department of Foreign Affairs officials had violated his Charter rights by being complicit in his mistreatment at Gitmo.
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Yesterday Harper's federal government disgraced itself by announcing it will go to the Supreme Court in a bid to overturn that ruling.
They do not want to risk asking the US for Khadr's return, perhaps because the Obama Administration urged a federal judge to order the release of Mohammed Jawad, and even George W. Bush granted requests by other countries for the repatriation of their citizens from Gitmo.
Harper is going to the wall in hopes that a sufficient number of Canadians believe in tiered citizenship and a four-tiered passport system and will applaud his stand against so-called 'activist' judges. He's wrong about that.

"Sudan will be your Guantanamo" CSIS told Abdelrazik

Abousfian Abdelrazik spoke out this morning about his exile, his torture, the false charges against him, the harrassment of his dying Canadian wife and her family by CSIS before he returned to Sudan to care for his ailing mother in 2003.
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He could identify by sight, he told us, the Canadian agents who questioned him while he was in captivity in Sudan, including the one who told him "Sudan will be your Guantanamo" and that he was never coming home.
He describes being interrogated in Sudan in 2008 by Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary Deepak Obhrai, who questioned him about Osama bin Laden and what he thought of Israel.
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I watched it on tv.
Paul Koring, Dr. Dawg, and Kady were there.
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There's a sense in which this case is more important than that of Maher Arar in terms of how Canadians, at least Muslim Canadians, can expect to be treated by our government, and whether CSIS can legitimately be said to be under anyone's control any more.
There was no US middleman here, no wiggle room in which Canadian intelligence agencies could claim to have been overpowered or misled or shut out of the proceedings by US security forces.
This one is all ours.
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In the meantime, Abdelrazik is still on that 1267 UN blacklist : he cannot work, he cannot receive money or medical attention, he cannot fly, he cannot receive gifts.
He is currently an exile in Canada.
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UPDATE : "NDP foreign-affairs critic Paul Dewar called on the government to launch a public inquiry even more far reaching than the judicial probe into the imprisonment and torture in Syria of Maher Arar. ... there was no middle man," Dewar said.

Deepak Obhrai is currently away in Asia.

Torture counterproductive - who could have guessed?

You would think that the points made by this former counter-intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan would be self-evident. You would think that, but then if you are reading this blog you probably aren't a knuckle-dragging right-wing sadistic moron that thinks "24" is a documentary.

General Petraus apparently agrees - and its nice to see him admit that the United States has violated the Geneva Convention, rather than just arguing that such an international agreement is "quaint".

crossposted from the Woodshed

CSIS agents secretly interrogated Abdelrazik

in a Sudanese prison in October of 2003 after he was jailed "at the request of mysterious 'Canadian' authorities", newly released government documents show.

A February 2008 Foreign Affairs briefing note to Maxime Bernier confirms :

"We were not informed of his arrest until November 2003, when Sudanese authorities advised us he was detained at the request of the government of Canada (please see attached memo for more detail)."

Unfortunately we don't know which mysterious Canadian authority because that attached eight page memo obtained by NDP MP Paul Dewar has "every single word, including the page numbers, blacked out."

Not us, says CSIS, insisting CSIS "does not, and has not, arranged for the arrest of Canadian citizens overseas."

So how did you know he was there then? Paul Koring at the G&M reasonably asks - especially as Foreign Affairs claims not to have known he'd been arrested until a month later in November.

Later today Dewar will attempt to force a motion asking for Abdelrazik to be brought before the foreign affairs committee. The motion will fail because the Cons have shown they will go to extraordinary lengths to keep him from coming home, presumably at least in part to protect "mysterious Canadian authorities".

5pm Update : In comments, Skdadl and Frank point out that my link to Koring's G&M article is a rewrite from last night's original, which contained these two now missing additional paragraphs :

"Although the most recently obtained documents confirm another glaring discrepancy in the claims made by various government agencies involved with Mr. Abdelrazik, a review of thousands of pages of document in The Globe's possession shows that not everyone in the Foreign Affairs ministry was unaware of Mr. Abdelrazik's imprisonment.

In an Oct., 16, 2003, e-mail marked “secret,” officials of the intelligence unit of Foreign Affairs note that CSIS agents will pass on details of their then just-completed interrogation of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo and planned to “send two officers to Sudan next week to interview Abdelrazik.” "

Skdadl is reminded of Arar. Yes.

In 2002 at Bagram prison, a 15 year old Omar Khadr was shown photographs of Arar.

On January 2009 at a military commission hearing in Guantanamo Bay: "[FBI]special agent Robert Fuller told Khadr's war-crimes hearing that the young Canadian was not immediately able to name Arar, but did say he looked familiar."

He looked familiar. On such evidence hangs the lives of men.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

NYTimes :

"A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay."

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Guardian :

"The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

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If Garzón ... issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

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The 1984 UN Convention against Torture, signed and ratified by the US, requires states to investigate allegations of torture committed on their territory or by their nationals, or extradite them to stand trial elsewhere."

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This may have a better chance than going directly after Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld.

It's a start.

Taser™ Nation

"A decade ago, ordinary Americans would not have tolerated such widespread use of the Taser, a stun gun delivering a 50,000-volt shock. They would not have tolerated the electrocution of unarmed, non-threatening civilians without following the normal "escalation of force" policy.

Ironically, American political leaders and the media once cast aspersion on the regimes of Guatemala and Argentina, which used cattle-prods on prisoners. Cattle-prods only deliver 25,000-volt shocks, half that of the Taser.

Guantanamo helped condition the American public. It raised the threshold of what Americans consider reasonable in violating personal space by the state - or by its private contractors, like Halliburton, which has built parts of Gitmo, or Lockheed Martin, which has provided professional interrogators.

The transfer of violations from Guantanamo to the US "Homeland" might be one purpose behind Guantanamo in the first place. After all, hardly any real terrorists were convincingly exposed at Guantanamo, and even some federal authorities wonder aloud that more than one-third of the detainees might be entirely innocent. By and large, Gitmo was populated with taxi cab drivers, goat herders and even teenage students, most having been delivered to US forces by bounty hunters and opium warlords."

Andrew Bosworth : Taser Nation

Kuebler suggests that Harper grow a pair

Gitmo trials rigged , says Omar Khadr's US military lawyer :

"He's not going to get a fair trial," Kuebler told The Canadian Press from his office in Washington, D.C."
Military commissions aren't designed to be fair. They're designed to produce convictions."
Harper could pre-empt the hearing by asking Washington to send Khadr -Guantanamo Bay's lone western detainee and also its youngest - back to Canada, Kuebler said.
"I hope that the prime minister of Canada finally decides to stand up and act like a prime minister of Canada and protect the rights of a Canadian citizen."

Algeria managed it. Algeria. Also Saudi Arabia, Pakistan ...
But we won't. Why? Apparently because the charges against Khadr are serious :

"Mr. Khadr is accused of very serious things," the prime minister said last week. "There is a legal process in the United States. He can make his arguments in that process."

"We can't ignore the serious charges Mr. Khadr is facing," [PM's new spokesweasel Kory] Teneycke said. "The proper forum for determining his guilt or innocence is a judicial process not a political process."

"Eugénie Cormier-Lassonde, spokesperson for Canada's department of foreign affairs, says Khadr faces "serious charges ... includ[ing] murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, material support for terrorism, and spying, all in violation of the laws of war."See, apparently Canada just doesn't do the "serious things" ourselves.

Sure, we're ok for the non-serious stuff, like making apologies to First Nations and promising aid to Africa that we don't deliver, but when it comes to the really serious things like torture and illegal kangaroo courts - well, we leave that stuff up to the Serious People : Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld - people who can't travel outside their own country without triggering war criminal proceedings.

Gates and CondiRice are on record as wanting Guantanamo shut down, McCain and Obama have vowed to close it, and US Supreme Court has ruled against it three times in as many years.
As Kuebler recently said of Harper : "He can stop taking his orders from the Bush administration and stop being the last leader of a Western country to subsidize a failed process in Guantanamo Bay."

But Harper is not a leader, so Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, a conservative Republican in the U.S. Navy who most definitely does have a pair, is doing his best to fill in for him.

Cross-posted, more or less, at Creekside

How Very Sad . . . .

Disappointing, but not unexpected.

Per the CBC this morning:

Harper's office stands firm on Khadr position
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 | 9:59 AM ET

CBC News

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office has weighed in on the release of videotapes showing Toronto-born Omar Khadr being interrogated by Canadian agents at Guantanamo Bay in February 2003, saying the federal government will not change its position on the case.

"Mr. Khadr faces serious charges. There is a judicial process underway to determine Mr. Khadr's fate. This should continue," Kory Teneycke, the prime minister's director of communications, told CBC News Tuesday morning, hours after Khadr's lawyers released excerpts of the tapes.

The excerpts show Khadr, then 16, weeping as he is interviewed by agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He also lifts his shirt to show them the wounds he says he incurred during a battle with American troops in Afghanistan six months before — during which the U.S. military contends the Canadian teenager threw a grenade that killed an American soldier.

"Any comments on the actual contents of the interrogation video must be directed to CSIS," Teneycke said. "The [Prime Minister's Office] will not be making any comments on content." (Ed. emphasis)

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Teneycke said the government of Canada will not seek Khadr's return to Canada on humanitarian grounds, as human rights groups and opposition politicians have been demanding.

"We might also add in terms of background that the government of Canada's position is consistent with the previous government's," the spokesman said. "This is a judicial process as opposed to a political one."

Earlier Tuesday, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae called for Khadr's return, saying the previous Liberal government's decision was in line with what was then known about the case.

Based on new revelations, Rae said, "I think the question is what do we do now?… And the answer is we bring him home."

So, the PMO will not be commenting on "content." What can we expect them to comment on?

Drivel?

Media spin?

Rumours?

Bob Rae is right.

It's time to bring Khadr home to face the Canadian justice system and not a kangaroo court in Guantanamo.

stevie is doing georgie proud, isn't he ? ? ? ?



Update 7/16: (per Reuters)


Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Khadr faces serious charges and should go on trial.

"Our position has not changed and it's not going to. We're not going to blow in the wind on something as fundamental as this," Harper's chief spokesman Kory Teneycke told Reuters.


Jerk-sticks . . . .

Justice, Although Delayed

bushco dealt another blow (and not the good kind). Compliments of McClatchy.

Supreme Court rules Guantanamo prisoners have right to sue in U.S. courts

Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers - June 12, 2008 11:17:37 AM

WASHINGTON — A sharply divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their extended imprisonment in federal court, and struck down as inadequate an alternative review system set up by Congress.

Repudiating a key tenet of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror policy, the court’s 5-4 majority concluded the foreigners held in Guantanamo Bay retain the same habeas corpus rights as U.S. residents.

“Some of these petitioners have been in custody for the past six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “Their access to the writ is necessary to determine the lawfulness of their status, even if, in the end, they do not obtain the relief they seek.”

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The court’s conservative wing, including Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, at times with sharp words of their own.

“The nation will live to regret what the court has done today,” Scalia wrote.

Big surprise on the dissenting judges. Who would've guessed that one?

How much longer 'til the bushco crowd is brought up on war crimes charges ? ? ? ?

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

China goes to Gitmo

NYT : Terrorism and the Olympics

"After 9/11, China declared its own war on terror in Xinjiang, but Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented that this often has targeted Uighurs who are completely nonviolent. [Uighurs are Turkic farmers inhabiting the Xinjiang region]

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has largely backed this Chinese version of the war on terror. Indeed, a Department of Justice report this month suggests that American troops softened up Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo Bay on behalf of visiting Chinese interrogators. The American troops starved the Uighurs and prevented them from sleeping, just before inviting in the Chinese interrogators."

The author Nicholas Kristof also has a blog where he notes :

"What irks me is the Bush administration backing the Chinese Communist Party as it uses the "war on terror" as a cover to go after those moderate Uighur dissidents who favor more autonomy or religious freedom but oppose any violence. The Bush administration listed the "East Turkistan Islamic Movement" as a terror organization in the aftermath of 9/11, apparently as a "thanks" to Beijing for its help in cracking down on terror financing."

"Thanks", as in : China leaned on Pakistan, Pakistan made promises, Pakistan is no longer keeping them.

So in exchange for some financial finangling, China gets to blur the line between dissidents who oppose violence and terrorists.

All of which leaves me wondering what Canada's Gitmo deal is with the US, the one wherein we make nice about being the last country in the world to press for release of a Canadian child-soldier held there since his 15th birthday in 2002.
Yesterday Khadr's US military lawyer William Kuebler alleged that Col. Peter Brownback, the judge hearing Omar Khadr's case, was abruptly dismissed, after he "threatened to suspend the case unless prosecutors turned over key evidence to the defense lawyers".

In April Maxime Bernier stood beside Condi Rice in Washington and announced it would be

"premature to comment about the legal process right now and appeal process because they’re still ongoing. And what we will do is we’ll do -- and I received also assurances that Mr. Khadr has been treated humanely."

"And what we will do is we'll do --" a little thought hiccup there from Max. I wonder now what he stopped himself from saying.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Omar Khadr

G&M : "The U.S. soldier Omar Khadr is alleged to have killed may have died as a result of friendly fire, Mr. Khadr's lawyers argued at Guantanamo Bay yesterday.

Mr. Khadr's U.S. military defence lawyer, Lieutenant-Commander Bill Kuebler, revealed in court that several accounts of the 2002 gun battle show that U.S. soldiers were throwing grenades when they stormed the Afghan compound containing Mr. Khadr.

Mr. Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. troops, mortally wounding a medic. The Canadian was 15 at the time."

That's Khadr in the picture at his time of capture.

"It was also revealed that an official with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs met Thursday with lawyers in the Khadr case in Guantanamo Bay, and showed them a copy of a report compiled by the Americans in the months after the 2002 Afghan battle."

"The report was originally deemed classified, but was then declassified when it was handed over to the Canadians.
Military prosecutors at Guantanamo Bay, after reviewing the report, said it may still contain classified information, so Cdr. Kuebler would not comment on its details. However, he said it includes exculpatory information because it contains a description of events that is inconsistent with — and, at times, contradictory to — other reports.
The Canadian copy of the report is especially important because the Americans have since been unable to locate the original copy, meaning the Canadian copy of the report may be the only one still available."

There's a dim hope this may prove a breakthrough for Khadr.

In February a leaked copy of witness testimony revealed that Khadr had not been the only survivor in the compound, as previously claimed, and that nobody had seen him throw the grenade.

In March, Kuebler insisted that "Lt. Col. W.", the Army Commander for Eastern Afghanistan at the time of the attack, had initially written in his report the day after the firefight that "the person who threw a grenade that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher J. Speer also died in the firefight", meaning of course that the grenade had not been thrown by Khadr. The report was rewritten several months later to say that the grenade thrower had been "engaged", rather than "killed", changing the wording that would have possibly exonerated Khadr.

In 2005, Guantanamo's then chief prosecutor told presiding officers that any evidence suggesting a suspect was innocent would be given a secret security classification, so that defence teams would not learn of its existence.

Although the G&M story doesn't specifically say so, I sincerely hope this visiting DFAIT official brought the Canadian copy of the original US report because Canada has behaved shamefully up till now, refusing to request the extradition of a child soldier despite third party testimony of his having been tortured.
Not that Canada hasn't been involved . Khadr was visited six times in Guantanamo by Canadian officials who showed him pictures of people they wished identified, including Maher Arar, before turning his testimony over to US officials. Khadr's US military lawyer eventually requested that they be refused further access to Khadr for his own benefit.

Currently Cdr. Kuebler is waiting on whether the Canadian Supreme Court will ask the government to hand over all documents relating to Khadr's case.

"Cdr. Kuebler said Mr. Khadr's conviction is effectively a done deal if a trial commences under the current conditions. "I don't believe anyone can get an acquittal in Guantanamo Bay," he said."

"Canada had reason to know that Omar was being, if not tortured, at least seriously mistreated by the U.S. government and yet it did nothing and has done nothing," said Kuebler.
"I think it's shameful that Canada has displayed indifference for the plight of a Canadian citizen for no other reason than his father and family are unpopular."

On Tuesday, standing next to Condoleezza Rice in Washington, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said : "Mr. Khadr faces serious charges and it will be premature to comment about the legal process right now and appeal process because they’re still ongoing. And what we will do is we’ll do -- and I received also assurances that Mr. Khadr has been treated humanely. So we’ll see the legal procedure, and after that we’ll react."

Cross-posted at Creekside

So THAT's why they want to close Guantanamo

Alright, we've heard a shopping list of reasons why we're fighting in Afghanistan. (I use "we're" cautiously and in a sense that the nation has been committed to that action. The actual fighting is falling to a relative handful of people.)

We've heard how we're there to make the lives of the people better, even though we lob artillery rounds into their villages. We're there to improve the lives of the women, even though the suicide rate and acts of self-immolation among Afghan women has increased in the past two years. We're there to secure a democracy, even though the government of Hamid Karzai about as corrupt as any failed state anywhere on the planet.

We've heard that the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are not linked, to which every thinking individual simply utters, "Bullshit." We've heard that we are not aiding and abetting the actions of the Bush administration because the Afghanistan mission is NATO led and UN sanctioned, to which anyone with a feel for the deployment of troops would respond with laughter.

We've also heard that the US wants to close down Guantanamo Camp Delta and, because of the way the Bush administration has handled... anything, we take a "believe it when we see it" posture.

Here's one of the reasons why.

The United States is helping build a prison in Afghanistan to take some prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay, but the White House said Friday that it's not meant as an alternative to the detainee facility in Cuba.

I wouldn't recommend eating that. Most of what comes out of the White House spin machine, as we are all aware, is utter horse shit.

The Bush administration has said it wants to close Guantanamo Bay and move terror suspects to prisons elsewhere. Senior officials have told The Associated Press a consensus is building among the president's top advisers on how to do it.

In other words, they have no plan or, if they have a plan they're not telling.

The administration is looking to resolve the issue swiftly, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino told reporters Friday, although she said there's no deadline set.

Because deadlines are a terrible thing to waste. They create pressure... you know, to get things done.

At the White House, Perino said Mr. Bush has directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to work with her counterparts around the world to try to repatriate detainees to their home countries, make sure they are held safely and treated humanely and that they are not allowed to perpetrate acts of terrorism.

So... send them to Afghanistan. Where torture and maltreatment are virtually unheard of.

A proposal gaining traction among Mr. Bush's top national security advisers would have some of the most dangerous suspects at Guantanamo transferred to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., officials say.

That makes sense. Then there's the rest of it: charges, trials, legal counsel. You know, the stuff one would expect out of a country which makes loud noises about the rule of law being deficient when referring to other countries.

The move is opposed by Cheney's office and the Justice Department, which argue that transferring prisoners to U.S. soil would give them undeserved rights and pose a threat to the United States.

Why does that not surprise me? And that disclosure alone is reason enough to state that everything the White House press secretary said is an outright lie.

So, despite the multitude of other reasons we are fighting in Afghanistan, one that we can now add to the list is to secure a place of permanent detention for the Bush administration's unwanted enemy combatants and to avoid having to actually go through something so messy as due process.