Families of U.S.S. Cole Sailors Unhappy with Justice Delayed

THEY AREN’T THE ONLY ONES SUFFERING

By Sherwood Ross

Truer words were rarely spoken than those uttered by Retired Navy Comdr. Kirk Lippold, the defense advisor to Military Families United, when he said the relatives of the sailors killed and wounded in the attack on the destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Yemen had waited eight years for the accused to be brought to justice and that “Justice delayed is justice denied.” If the phrase isn’t exactly novel maybe that’s because words to that effect first appeared in the Magna Carta, a milepost of Western justice, signed back in 1215 A.D. The document also enshrined the right to habeas corpus, granting appeal against unlawful imprisonment.

Lippold commanded the Cole Oct. 12, 2000, when it lost 17 crew members in that tragic bombing. He was among those who met with President Obama Friday(Feb. 6) to express their opposition to Obama’s Jan. 22nd order to close Guantanamo prison, Cuba, where an al-Qaida suspect accused of  masterminding the Cole bombing is being held. Obama is acting because of “the military commission’s failure to bring those in detention to swift justice,” his press secretary Robert Gibbs understated.

Adding to the frustration of the Cole families, the previous day Gitmo Convening Authority Susan Crawford dropped charges against that very al-Qaida suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, on grounds he confessed to plotting the ship’s bombing “only because he was tortured by U.S. interrogators,” the Associated Press reported. Indeed, the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) admitted the man was subjected to waterboarding, an agonizing form of torture akin to drowning. According to a report in The Miami Herald(Feb. 7), Obama assured his visitors al Nashiri would remain in custody and eventually be tried, perhaps under a modified military commission system. (What’s wrong with the real courts?)

While I don’t know the merits of the charges against al Nashiri, it’s a fact the U.S. has freed the overwhelming majority of Gitmo prisoners for lack of proof. The first three inmates charged were a chauffeur for bin Laden and two juveniles, not exactly “the worst of the worst” as Dick Cheney once alleged. Unless, of course, you want to count Sami Al-Haj, an Al Jazeera reporter recently freed from Gitmo after six years of detention as a “terrorist” because he was trained in the use of a camera! 

The suspicion Bush ordered dragnet arrests of thousands of innocents to make it appear the world is full of anti-American terrorists grows stronger every day. According to his lawyer, Al-Haj was questioned 120 times by interrogators who pressed him to say Qatar-based TV network Al Jazeera is an al-Qaeda front. Defense lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the human rights group “Reprieve,” in an interview with Pacifica Radio’s Amy Goodman noted Gitmo’s chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis resigned on grounds a Bush official told him there could be no acquittals of Gitmo suspects, proof the whole shebang is rigged.

By the way, Obama’s aides are saying they’re not inclined to prosecute adult CIA goons that tortured captives because they were “following orders,” (the old Adolf Eichmann defense) while confessions have been wrung by those same CIA torturers out of Arab juveniles for following orders or, in most cases, for having done nothing at all.

Lawyer Smith says the 270 remaining Gitmo prisoners are the tip of a massive iceberg in which 27,000 prisoners of the U.S. are secretly frozen. Reprieve claims 32 vessels have been converted to prison ships in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere to house them, far from the prying eyes of the Red Cross and reporters. One was spotted tied up in Lisbon harbor. The U.S. also funds what Smith calls “proxy prisons” in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where inmates “have been severed from their legal rights.” One of Smith’s clients, Benyam Mohammed, said the only “evidence” his Moroccan interrogators extracted from him they got by torturing him with a razor blade to his genitals.

Writing in the January-February The Catholic Worker, Managing Editor Matt Vogel points out the U.S. military has estimated since it began the “War on Terror” in 2001, “it alone has detained over 80,000 people” and “all have been held without trial, charges or access to lawyers, hidden away from the outside world, and many prisoners faced torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment…and as we press President Obama to shut down Guantanamo, we cannot forget the rest of those the US has disappeared.”

Vogel writes as of this January 1, the U.S. was to transfer to the Iraqi Interior Ministry those prisoners among the 15,800 it is holding in Iraq it considers dangerous and to liberate the rest.  And just as it had no proof against the vast majority of Gitmo prisoners, Vogel notes the Pentagon is scrambling to “to find evidence of criminality for the roughly 5,000 prisoners it considers dangerous.” He writes, “This underscores the fact that thousands of people have been held without access to courts or lawyers and without charge, many for years.” And although Bush said in 2006 “the secret prisons are now empty” Reprieve says there have been 200 cases of rendition and secret detention since.

Getting back to the Cole families, if it’s a denial of justice to keep them waiting year after year for a trial, what has Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri undergone to have been held without due process all these years and tortured as well? Do Americans generally think about the tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim innocents, including children, arrested illegally and separated from their families who are rotting in the holds of prison ships and dungeons, who are denied due process that was granted even in the days of the Magna Carta, and who have not been allowed a visit by the Red Cross or a lawyer?

To see how far America has descended toward totalitarianism in our time is to recall that during World War II USA received thousands of prisoners from German General Rommel’s Africa Corps and elsewhere. These prisoners, many of them hardened Nazis, were transported to the Midwest to work on farms, where they were treated fairly and with no brutality. Some attended church on Sundays and got to see what life in America was like. After the war, a good number, appreciative of our kindness, pleaded to stay in the United States. Cheney-Bush didn’t follow America’s WWII Golden Rule example.

President Obama needs to devote some serious thought to the necessity of bringing to justice the Bush administration officials responsible for rendition, secret imprisonment and torture.  As for the thousands arrested without due process, they need to be set free now, as guaranteed even under the Magna Carta. Cmdr. Lippold was right about justice delayed. He’d be right, too, if he also spoke out against false imprisonment.   

Sherwood Ross, who formerly reported for newspapers and wire services, directs a Miami-based public relations firm for good causes. Reach him at [email protected]

Sherwood Ross

Sherwood Ross is an award-winning reporter. He served in the U.S Air Force where he contributed to his base newspaper. He later worked for The Miami Herald and Chicago Daily News. He contributed a weekly column on working for a major wire service. He is also an editorial and book publicist. He currently resides in Florida.