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Detainees Deserve Court Trials
By P. Sabin Willett
Monday, November 14, 2005; Page A21
As the Senate prepared to vote Thursday to abolish the
writ of habeas corpus, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jon
Kyl were railing about lawyers like me. Filing
lawsuits on behalf of the terrorists at Guantanamo
Bay. Terrorists! Kyl must have said the word 30 times.
As I listened, I wished the senators could meet my
client Adel.
Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean
the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and
ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a
terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon
paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.
The military people reached this conclusion, and they
wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the
memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his
prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months
later. And these facts would still be a secret but for
one thing: habeas corpus.
Only habeas corpus got Adel a chance to tell a federal
judge what had happened. Only habeas corpus revealed
that it wasn't just Adel who was innocent -- it was
Abu Bakker and Ahmet and Ayoub and Zakerjain and Sadiq
-- all Guantanamo "terrorists" whom the military has
found innocent.
Habeas corpus is older than even our Constitution. It
is the right to compel the executive to justify itself
when it imprisons people. But the Senate voted to
abolish it for Adel, in favor of the same "combatant
status review tribunal" that has already exonerated
him. That secret tribunal didn't have much impact on
his life, but Graham says it is good enough.
Adel lives in a small fenced compound 8,000 miles from
his home and family. The Defense Department says it is
trying to arrange for a country to take him -- some
country other than his native communist China, where
Muslims like Adel are routinely tortured. It has been
saying this for more than two years. But the rest of
the world is not rushing to aid the Bush
administration, and meanwhile Adel is about to pass
his fourth anniversary in a U.S. prison.
He has no visitors save his lawyers. He has no news in
his native language, Uighur. He cannot speak to his
wife, his children, his parents. When I first met him
on July 15, in a grim place they call Camp Echo, his
leg was chained to the floor. I brought photographs of
his children to another visit, but I had to take them
away again. They were "contraband," and he was
forbidden to receive them from me.
In a wiser past, we tried Nazi war criminals in the
sunlight. Summing up for the prosecution at Nuremberg,
Robert Jackson said that "the future will never have
to ask, with misgiving: 'What could the Nazis have
said in their favor?' History will know that whatever
could be said, they were allowed to say. . . . The
extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an
attribute of our strength."
The world has never doubted the judgment at Nuremberg.
But no one will trust the work of these secret
tribunals.
Mistakes are made: There will always be Adels. That's
where courts come in. They are slow, but they are not
beholden to the defense secretary, and in the end they
get it right. They know the good guys from the bad
guys. Take away the courts and everyone's a bad guy.
The secretary of defense chained Adel, took him to
Cuba, imprisoned him and sends teams of lawyers to
fight any effort to get his case heard. Now the Senate
has voted to lock down his only hope, the courts, and
to throw away the key forever. Before they do this, I
have a last request on his behalf. I make it to the 49
senators who voted for this amendment.
I'm back in Cuba today, maybe for the last time. Come
down and join me. Sen. Graham, Sen. Kyl -- come meet
the sleepy-eyed young man with the shy smile and the
gentle manner. Afterward, as you look up at the bright
stars over Cuba, remembering what you've seen in Camp
Echo, see whether the word "terrorist" comes quite so
readily to your lips. See whether the urge to abolish
judicial review rests easy on your mind, or whether
your heart begins to ache, as mine does, for the
country I thought I knew.
The writer is one of a number of lawyers representing
Guantanamo Bay prisoners on a pro bono basis.
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