Obama and Detention in the New Yorker
Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download
, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,
the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.
Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:
For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…
After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.
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