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The Guantánamo Trials: Castles Built Of Sand & Other Bush Torture Regime News

August 18th, 2008
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist

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When the Bush administration put out the word that only guilty verdicts were allowable at the Guantánamo Bay war crimes tribunal, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann saluted crisply and answered the call.

01aaahartmann.jpgHartmann (small photo), an Air Force reservist and corporate lawyer, has been a relentless and aggressive advocate for the military commission system despite his supposedly neutral role and so shamelessly pro-prosecution that a military judge has barred him from acting as a legal advisor to an accused terrorist for the second time.

The judge, Stephen Henley, also ordered a new top-level review of the charges against Mohammed Jawad, who is accused of attempted murder for allegedly throwing a grenade as a teen that wounded two U.S. soldiers and their translator in a bazaar in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Hartmann’s aggressive advocacy in the media and other public statements ”compromised the objectivity necessary to dispassionately and fairly evaluate the evidence and prepare the post-trial evaluation,” Henley ruled in declaring that the general could not serve as a “neutral advisor” on the case.

The ruling means that Pentagon officials will need to appoint a new legal advisor over the trial, one of 20 so far in the pipeline. Hartmann still has oversight of the other 19.

Hartmann’s first disqualifiction was in the run up to the just-completed trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

Hamdan, who admitted to being Osama bin Laden’s driver, received a 5 1/2 year sentence after being found guilty of only a lesser charge of material support for terrorism and acquitted of the far more serious charge of conspiracy.

The unexpectedly light sentence, which means that Hamdan could be released in about five months because of time served, has put the Pentagon in a quandary: While the White House got less than a half a loaf with the sentence, it can claim that the system worked but at the same time has vowed that Hamdan will not be released from custody until the Global War on Terror is over.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for an index with links to torture-related post and here for the last of 25 excerpts from Jan Mayer’s The Dark Side.



This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 3:41 am and is filed under GWOT, Osama bin Laden, Pentagon, George W. Bush, Bush Administration, Justice Department, CIA, Guantanamo Bay, Al Qaeda, Torture, Barack Obama. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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