Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham is the worst nightmare of the craven Bush adminstration and its apologists:
- A decorated intelligence officer;
- A lifelong Army reservist;
- A conservative who "cried when Nixon resigned";
- A very sharp lawyer;
- The son of a Holocaust survivor;
- Their own choice of who should manage evidence on detainees at Guantanamo.
In short, Abraham has a resumé that's tough for even the most loyal Dittohead to dismiss. And he's blowing the whistle on the Guantanamo tribunals.
In a devastating New York Times profile by William Glaberson, this paragon of the Right is saying that the tribunals used to try the anonymous detainees are "deeply flawed," "rubber stamp" affairs. He is saying the evidence against them is mostly "superficial," based on "generalizations," with accusations made on bare circumstantial clues and guilt by association.
And the courts are actually taking him seriously, as we'll see after the jump.
Just days after detainees' lawyers submitted an affidavit containing his criticisms, the United States Supreme Court reversed itself and agreed to hear an appeal arguing that the hearings are unjust and that detainees have a right to contest their detentions in federal court.
Some lawyers say Colonel Abraham's account -- of a hearing procedure that he described as deeply flawed and largely a tool for commanders to rubber-stamp decisions they had already made -- may have played an important role in the justices' highly unusual reversal. That decision once again brought the administration face to face with the vexing legal, political and diplomatic questions about the fate of Guantánamo and the roughly 360 men still held there.
A guy who's actually able to pierce the fog of ideology blinding the likes of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito -- even temporarily, as one suspects they may come to their (ahem) "senses" -- is truly a threat to the administration.
Bush and Cheney and their loyalists have told us over and over again that these political prisoners in an American Gulag are the "worst of the worst," the embodiment of evil. Turns out many at most were "found in a suspect area" or "associated with a suspect organization."
In short, there is more reason than ever to believe that most of these political prisoners are being kept incommunicado to prevent the world from finding out they’re innocent, rather than to protect us from the guilty.
A Nuremburg-style trial for Bush and Cheney would be too good for them, as it would afford these crooks more legal rights and protections than they would ever extend to the pawns in their game.
NOTE: Glaberson, the author of this must-read article, is the same writer who penned an awe-inspiring series exposing of New York State's atrociously corrupt system of incompetent Town Justices last year; he is one of the Times' best.