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Legal Scholar Compares Gitmo Court to Stalinist Show Trials
Gitmo Proceedings Will be “Stalinist Show Trials,” Legal Authority Charges
By Sherwood Ross
The future trials planned for prisoners in Guantanamo Bay detention camp will be “Stalinist show trials” as their preliminary proceedings “have already proven them to be Travesties of Justice,” a distinguished international law authority warns.
“Even worse yet,” says Francis Boyle, professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign, the “fully-functioning Stalinist Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will quickly become conveyor-belts of death for alleged and already tortured terrorist suspects along the lines of the Texas execution chamber operated by George Bush Jr. when he was the ‘governor’ of that state and tortured to death 152 victims by means of lethal injection.”
Saying the Gitmo proceedings are grievously deficient, Boyle asserted “they constitute war crimes under the Laws of War, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and even the U.S. Army’s own Field Manual 27-10, the Laws of Land Warfare (1956.)”
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Boyle said, “executing persons detained as a result of armed conflict without a fair trial before a regularly constituted court constitutes a grave war crime” and the Stalinist-type show trials would do just that, says Boyle. He predicted the Guantanamo Bay prison will become Americas first-ever Nazi-style death camp.
Boyle, who has represented a number of military personnel who refused to participate in illegal U.S. wars in the Middle East, said the Obama administration is continuing the second Bush administration’s “hideous atrocities perpetrated against human rights, international law, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and America’s Bill of Rights.”
The law professor went on to charge that the Obama government has not applied the Uniform Code of Military Justice to the Guantanamo courts despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The Pentagon’s “Kangaroo Courts System on Guantanamo…(has) been soundly condemned by every rights organization and every human rights official and leader in the entire world as well as by the United State Supreme Court itself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,” Boyle said.
Boyle told Anti-War News Service that “it would also be perfectly lawful under the Geneva Conventions for the Obama administration to transfer the Gitmo prisoners to a neutral third state party to the Geneva Conventions for criminal trials consistent with the Geneva Conventions requirements for criminal trials.”
Boyle goes on to say some of the prisoners could be tried by the International Criminal Court, “but only for alleged offenses that took place after the ICC was established in 2002.” This perfectly lawful alternative, he said, would not apply to the alleged 9/11 conspirators but “it could and should be applied to other Gitmo prisoners who qualify for ICC prosecution by reason of time of their alleged offenses.”
Boyle said the Obama administration has ruled out alternative prosecutions because “they know the only way they can convict these individuals and sentence them to death is by means of the Gitmo Stalinist/Kangaroo Courts.”
Henry King Jr., who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War Two, has argued that the type of tribunals at Guantanamo Bay “violates the Nuremberg principles” and run counter to “the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949,” Wikipedia noted.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp was set up in 2002 initially to house prisoners taken by the U.S. in Afghanistan.
Boyle is the author of “Protesting Power: War, Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield Inc.), a book for lawyers to use in military courtmartials.
About the writer: Sherwood Ross, formerly a reporter for major dailies and wire service columnist, runs the Anti-War News Service. To contribute to his work or to comment, contact him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com .
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=96819
Posted by Sherwood Ross on Apr 17 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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[...] the original article at Veterans Today [...]
what americans fail to grasp is that washington’s treatment of the prisoners at guantanamo is what americans themselves will undergo as the police state continues to grow out of control
Dear Henry, well YOU grasp it! Thanks for your comment. The police state IS growing out of control. Sherwood
Exactly.
Imagine saying that this kangaroo torture center “violates the Nuremberg principles.” Nuremberg was where this confession-by-torture, execution-after-false-confession system originated. The Nuremberg and Dachau war crimes tribunals were conducted at the very same time that American soldiers were slaughtering German civilians by starvation and exposure under direct orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who’d already ordered over a million German POWs slaughtered from May to December, 1945. The tribunals were being conducted at the very time that millions of Russians, Ukrainians and others were being rounded up by the US Army and put in boxcars and sent East to be executed by the Soviets, under orders from Eisenhower, officially designated Operation Keelhaul.
The offshore torture center at Gitmo is the exact same thing as Nuremberg, which is another word for Jewish sadism, torturing and murdering enemies under the color of “law.” Jewish law is made-up law. The US military can never live down the disgrace of acting as torturers and executioners for the creepy Jews who have seized control of the American war machine and use it to murder anyone who resists Jewish power, or who offends Jewish sensibilities.
Every one of the “prisoners” at Gitmo, Baghram, Abu Ghraib, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Warsaw, Budapest and in many other offshore torture centers run by the US Army and on prison ships run by the US Navy – every one of these people is innocent of all charges other than resisting, some of them, American aggression and invasion of their countries. A lot of them are cab drivers and shop owners sold to the Americans for 25 grand each. Most of the thousands of previous “detainees” were quietly released after years of sadistic physical and mental torture, released with no explanation or apology, told to keep quiet or else. But we were assured that those guys were guilty, too! What happened? If they were so guilty, why were they released?
The ones who are left need to be executed to justify the torture centers, to prove that these were real bad guys, unlike the ones we had to let go. The torture centers are laboratories for Moslem experimentation. Moslems are tortured to find out what makes them tick, to discover weaknesses that can be generalized and exploited and of course just to inflict pain and terror. George Orwell explained in 1984 that the only purpose of torture is to inflict pain, not to elicit confessions. We don’t know if we are in complete control unless the victim is suffering.
Dear J. Bruce:
Blaming “creepy Jews” for running the American war machine is as good a piece of anti-Semitic rhetoric as I’ve read lately. To blame our government’s failings, magnified by the Bush administration, on “Jewish law” is to ignore the Ten Commandments, also a piece of Jewish law, while giving zero evidence of the Jewish “laws” you claim exist that endorse torture and for which you are holding Jews responsible. Time to site the texts of the laws to which you have reference. As for your claim that Nuremberg originated “confession-by-torture” is absurd, and please state your source for your contention that General Eisenhower ordered the slaughter of one million German POWs. –Sherwood
James Bacque’s Other Losses documents the Eisenhower-ordered starvation of over one million German POWs from May to December, 1945. He wrote it with the help of Col. Ernest Fisher, the chief historian of the US Army archives.
Bacque’s Crimes & Mercies documents the Eisenhower-ordered extermination of between nine and twelve million German civilians from 1945 to 1950.
There are several books about Operation Keelhaul, Ike’s program to round up and deport by force about five million refugees from Stalin to their quick deaths. The British called it Operation East Wind.
All of these operations were based on the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, which George Patton said in his memoirs was dreamed up by Eisenhower and presented to Morgenthau in Patton’s French HQ during a visit. Eisenhower’s extermination plan was based on the 1940 book, Germany Must Perish! by Theodore N. Kaufman. All these guys were Jews. Kaufman’s book was recommended reading by Franklin Roosevelt for US soldiers going to Europe. Kaufman was the American version of Ilya Ehrenberg.
You are apparently not aware of the total Jewish control of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Dachau War Crimes Tribunal. Perhaps I’ll do a piece on it for VT. I interviewed the chief Dachau prosecutor of Col. Jochen Peiper and the Malmedy SS defendants, Burton F. Ellis, and shall report what he told me about torturing confessions out of his accused, who all had their testicles crushed by Ellis’ Jewish torturers. Ellis also was a Jew, as were all his assistants. Very creepy Jews. And not a one of them was a Semite. Their behavior was so atrocious that all of Ellis’ death sentences were overturned and all defendants eventually released, including Peiper. The guy who got them overturned was Senator Joe McCarthy, who used his knowledge of Jewish torture to force the release of everyone awaiting the army hangman.
There is nothing absurd about my claim. You’re just not aware of what happened.
The Bush and Obama neo-con wars are wars for Israel. All torture conducted at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Baghram, etc. is against Moslems, the ones Israel wants wiped out. All the mass murder is for Israel.
Anyway, this gives me a good idea for a future piece.
Update – 25 April:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110425/ts_alt_afp/usattacksguantanamowikileaks