Uh, yeah, so the Bush administration was so worried about their torture program being revealed that when the Supreme Court decided to rule on whether Gitmo detainees had the right to sue in court, they sent Abu Zubaydah (who had been waterboarded 83 times) and KSM (who had been waterboarded 183 times) and others to random CIA black sites, so that the case could go forward and the SCOTUS justices would not be able to know that any detainees were tortured.
It's pretty clear that the Bush administration had disdain for the law and for their own office and its rules, but now we have proof that they've tried to completely subvert the court's processes.
The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights.
"This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts," said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees.
They didn't want the detainees exposed to lawyers or judges or anyone outside of their torturers and, essentially, kidnappers. They said that by that time they'd gotten all the information they needed (information, which by the way, ended up being all completely false) so it was okay to ship them to holding facilities rather than places where people could torture them some more.
Worse for the CIA, if the Supreme Court granted detainees rights, the entire covert program was at risk. Zubaydah and al-Nashiri could tell their lawyers about being waterboarded in Thailand. Al-Nashiri might discuss having a drill and an unloaded gun put to his head at a CIA prison in Poland.
"Anything that could expose these detainees to individuals outside the government was a nonstarter," one U.S. official familiar with the program said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the government's legal analysis.
All the talk of keeping the detainees from the reach of US courts, and all the fears of terrorists being "given rights", even, probably, the fears of terrorists being Mirandized were all based on the fact that Bush only wanted military tribunals instead of US courts because our justice system is GOOD and would have investigated and uncovered his torture program.
This had nothing to do with whether terrorists deserved to be given the chance for a hearing or whether or not America is too nice to those who hate us. Those were excuses for literally hiding evidence from the Supreme Court of the United States - putting it out of their reach to keep the administration out of trouble.
I wonder how the Court feels about that.
And here another Yoo memo comes into play:
The administration had worried for several years that this might happen. In 2001, Justice Department lawyers Patrick Philbin and John Yoo wrote a memo saying courts were unlikely to grant detainees such rights. But if it happened, they warned, prisoners could argue that the U.S. had mistreated them and that the military tribunal system was unlawful.
Heh. Basically Yoo says "no worries, the courts are on our side on this, but um, ohshit, if they aren't, then, this torture thingy might turn out bad."
And then the Supreme Court granted cert and everything went to shit.
This was all to:
- keep the courts from learning the truth, and,
- to allow the administration to torture and detain those prisoners for TWO MORE YEARS to get more information.
Remember, they got nothing. KSM admitted to shooting JFK among other things. Other detainees gave equally false testimony. I don't believe that good information would in any way justify this but it just SEEMS like they'd want to do this if there were an actual POINT. Their point seemed to be "we have power, so fuck your laws."