Warning: Admitting things while being tortured could have you in Gitmo for life
Who amongst us hasn’t admitted to wrong doing when a car battery was attached to our genitals? You know, hanging out with your buddies, drinking some beer, then being waterboarded until you admit to trying to overthrow the United States.
Well, those wacky kids being held at Guantanamo will likely learn the hard way, as the U.S. rushes to take advantage of any words they uttered while U.S. officials tortured them.
From CNN:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is submitting to Congress a manual for trials of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay that would allow the admission of hearsay evidence and coerced testimony, a Pentagon official told reporters Thursday.
The manual was drafted to comply with a law passed last year that restored the Bush administration’s military commissions created to try terrorist suspects.
The Supreme Court had struck down the commissions as unconstitutional.
The procedures outlined in the manual “will ensure that unlawful enemy combatants suspected of war crimes and certain other offenses are prosecuted before regularly constituted courts affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people,” said Principal Deputy General Counsel Dan Dell’Orto.
Dell’Orto called the manual “the most comprehensive legal framework for the prosecution of war criminals in U.S. history.”
About 400 detainees are being held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The statute provides for the admissibility of hearsay evidence, an issue of contention among defense lawyers. Dell’Orto said the admission of such evidence should not necessarily weigh against defendants, since they, too, can enter such evidence, which thereby “levels the playing field, if you will.”
Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, a legal adviser to the Office of Military Commissions, told reporters that the manual provides for a “clear prohibition of evidence obtained by torture” if it was obtained after December 30, 2005.
There was no word on how the U.S. plans to view coerced testimony at any of the secret prisons around the globe, but for those at Gitmo, a little legal advice - try and remember the information you gave U.S. authorities while they were stacking you naked on top of each other or keeping you alone and naked in a freezing cell. At least prior to Dec. 30, 2005. All the torture committed after that can’t be used against you, and was basically just done for kicks and because they could.
–WKW