Inside a Gitmo Hearing

Thanks to the BBC, we are treated to a view of what part of a hearing at Gauntanamo Bay is like.

And what it isn't like is any kind of legal procedure which would be recognised as such outside of a banana republic.

The BBC observed an ARB - the first time journalists had been allowed to do so. An Administrative Review Board, or ARB, decides if a detainee should be released because they pose no threat to the US, or whether they should be detained for another year, without being charged with any crimes and then going to the next stage of a military tribunal. They saw only the unclassified part of the proceedings.

In 2001, we heard, the detainee had fought on the front line in Afghanistan, alongside the Taleban during the retreat from Bagram, and there he had fired his Kalashnikov rifle. He then fled to a location near Jalalabad, where he "dug trenches and waited".

His name was found, the board heard, on the hard drives of computers seized during raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan.

The sources of these allegations were never revealed. It was unclear to us if they came from his own testimony, or intelligence, or elsewhere.


No witnesses were called. There was no legal counsel, either for prosecution or defense. There was no adversarial argument.

The board then heard a list of "mitigating factors". The detainee had told his captors that he had gone to Afghanistan for sightseeing. He had gone to Pakistan to buy hashish. On hearing this, in his only visible show of emotion, a broad smile spread across the detainee's face.

He had said he had never picked up a weapon. And he had no knowledge of terrorist attacks against the US, nor did he have anything against the US.

Much of what came under "mitigating factors" stood in direct contradiction to what had gone before...

We were struck by the cursory nature of the questioning, and the absence of an attempt to reconcile conflicting claims as to what the young, sullen detainee had actually done.

Only an ostrich would say this is constitutional for a nation that believes "all men are created equal" and deserve to be treated equally, tell themselves this is moral and just by any rational standard, tell themselves this is going to solve more problems than it creates.

This travesty of what the US claims to stand for on the international stage, coupled with the continued torture of detainees condoned and ass-covered by senior figures in the administration, will blacken the good name of a proud nation for generations to come. It is time and past time that the proceedings at Gitmo were brought fully into the light of US jurisprudence.