The Moderate Voice encourages weblogs to do original reporting which is one of the seldom-but potentially-potent tool of this new medium. Once again we points readers to The Talking Dog which is continuing its serious of interviews on Guantanamo related subjects. TTD is an attorney so his questions are quite good — and the interviews always provide food for vigorious debate.
And so it is this time with his interview witih Marc Falkoff. Once again we’ll give you the intro and one provocative passage but encourage readers of all sides to read it in full. At the bottom of his posts he gives links to TTD’s many past interviews.
Marc D. Falkoff is a Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb Illinois; Professor Falkoff is co-counsel with the national law firm of Covington & Burling in the representation of 17 Yemeni nationals held as detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. On March 28, 2007, I had the privilege of interviewing Marc Falkoff by telephone; what follows are my interview notes as corrected by Professor Falkoff. [I first interviewed Mr. Falkoff together with his then colleague at Covington & Burling, David Remes, in February 2006; that interview has not been published.]
And here’s a section that could prove to be quite controversial to all involved with and interested in this issue:
Marc Falkoff: …..Well, GTMO is a public relations disaster. So close it: bring the detainees still held into the United States– lock ‘em up at Fort Leavenworth. And charge the people who violated the laws of war or United States laws– and then put them on trial, using either the federal courts or ordinary courts martial. And that’s it. Period…..We have to stop pretending that there is such a thing as a “war against terrorâ€?. We do not know what those words mean. They mean nothing, of course. We have simply handed perpetual martial law powers to the President by continuing to believe those words. What is the worst thing that will happen if we have trials? Evidence obtained by torture will be excluded… so we can’t convict.
The Talking Dog: But isn’t that the bottom line here? Only being a little snarky… isn’t the argument that these are TERRORISTS, more powerful than thousands of nuclear armed Soviet ICBMs, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich and the Confederacy combined?Marc Falkoff: Exactly. But what this does is aggrandize the members of Al Qaeda. When we went to GTMO for the first time, we expected to be confronted with super-sly terrorists– super calculating, like the best top notch secret agents…
The reality is that this is absurd. If any of these guys are guilty, I submit that the United States has enough credible evidence not obtained by torture to convict some of them… although for most of them, if you remove the evidence tainted by torture and coercion… you have nothing left. Why is the evidence obtained this way untrustworthy? BECAUSE IT IS FALSE.
The British historian Andy Worthington is working on a history– he is piecing together the available CSRT material, and showing what the GTMO detainees are… and it is not much. What appears to have happened, after the Tora Bora bombing, two groups of people took off– one headed north to the White Mountains, the other headed on the road to the border crossing at Khost… The United States military decided that AQ leadership was heading for Khost, and began bombing and attacking that column… It turns out that the United States military picked wrong! They were attacking the wrong people– the Al Qaeda leadership and fighters were in the other column. But when the group attacked reached Khost, it included a large number of Arabic speakers, so the United States decided that THESE were the Al Qaeda fighters! Simple as that! You can explain nearly 1/3 of the Yemeni GTMO detainees just by that one incident! Truly mind-boggling!
Read it in its entirety.
NOTE: On April’s Fool Day TTD offered this original interview with Donald Rumsfeld.
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.