The Talking Dog has a fascinating ORIGINAL INTERVIEW with the attorney for a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. It’s required reading for several reasons.
First, TTD has again shown what the medium of blogging can do, when an enterprising person who has a weblog decides that rather than just report on newspaper articles, commentaries and link to other weblogs he’ll do his own interview. Secondly, his questions are solid ones and elicit provocative information. And thirdly, depending on where you are coming from politically, you are certain to find something fascinating in this interview:
On November, 2004, shortly after the reelection of the American government which was in power at the time of the largest foreign attack againstthe United States on North American soil since the War of 1812, attorney Joshua Dratel was arguing on behalf of his client, Australian national David Hicks,at a military commission in a courthouse converted to accommodate classified information and proceedings on an American military base at Guanatamo Bay, Cuba, set up as one of the many ad hoc responses to that attack by that government. A short time later, U.S. District Judge James Robertson would stay the military commissions as unfair and unlawful, for a variety of reasons, and the commission proceedings have been stayed accordingly, pending the outcome of an appeal.
In the course of this representation, Mr. Dratel, who was assembling his own set of documents associated with American conduct of “the war on terror”, joined forces with Karen Greenberg, a historian at New York University, who was assembling her own set of documents, and the two collaborated on editing a lengthy tome called “The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib.”
On April 28, 2005, Mr. Dratel spoke to me by telephone.
The interview gives you the perspective of what it’s like for a lawyer operating under the special legal rules at Guantanamo. We all know the convincing arguments in favor of the special legal operation over there. So here, via a weblog, is a different perspective. A small taste (there is MUCH MORE so read it all):
Joshua Dratel: Basically, there are no rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs court-martials — that’s been thrown out. No standards at all. Total arbitrariness. No efforts at anything resembling fairness. Let’s start with evidence and proof. People don’t know this, of course. The government’s “proof” consists entirely of interrogators reading from reports of their interrogations– without any basis to challenge the underlying accounts of witnesses, such as the witnesses themselves (who have frequently been shipped out of Guantanamo) or their interpreters, or the conditions under which the statements were taken, which were frequently, to put it politely, “coercive.” Just statements from the detainees themselves– regardless of whether obtained from abuse, or coercion, even rising to torture. In the commissions, you simply can’t challenge them– you don’t have access to the witnesses.
Read the rest yourself. People will differ on whether Guantanamo’s set up is a good one or not (you can write your view in our comments section). But one thing is for sure: TTD is using his blog to give his readers (who may or may not agree with him) some information that goes beyond reacting to newspaper or broadcast reports or other bloggers.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.