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Debunking another Gitmo myth
By Michelle Malkin

June 22, 2005

2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Newsweek. Amnesty International. Jimmy Carter. ***** Durbin. The
Guantanamo Bay-bashing continues.

In a rant published Tuesday, the Minnesota Star Tribune actually
castigated Durbin for "caving in" on his slanderous remarks comparing
U.S. treatment of detainees at Gitmo to torture and genocide by Nazis,
Soviets and Pol Pot. The paper wrote that Durbin shouldn't have
apologized and decried the entire operation as a "hellhole."

But it's not just unhinged liberals who keep piling on.

The "maverick" Sen. John McCain echoed one of the Left's most
oft-cited and erroneous complaints about Gitmo on NBC's "Meet The
Press" this weekend – that detainees have been denied trials:

The weight of evidence has got to be that we've got to adjudicate
these people's cases, and ... if it means releasing some of them,
you'll have to release them. Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

(Can we put a lid on the Nazi analogies already? Crikey. A
Knight-Ridder reporter was too smitten to be bothered by his
Eichmann-invoking hyperbole: "McCain is emerging as a voice of
conscience and nuance on the stay-or-go Guantanamo issue." Nuance?)

GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham, another newly christened "maverick" who
appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, lodged similar allegations
about the absence of trials for Gitmo detainees:


We need a procedure and process that will allow us to determine who an
enemy combatant is, interrogate them to make us safer in a humane way,
and set up trials for the worst offenders and repatriate those who –
who don't meet the category of a – of a threat. That, to me, would
look good to the world. It would make us safer.


My friend, Judge Andrew Napolitano, made a similar assertion on Fox
News' "O'Reilly Factor" last week: "The government is not giving them
those trials."

And now, the facts:

Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has
received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result
of those hearings, more than three-dozen Gitmo detainees have been
released.

are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to
contest the facts on which their classification as "enemy combatants"
is based.


Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration's failure to abide by the
Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram
told me, "the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the
'Article V' hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations
where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the
Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case."

Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters – with full
access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the
attendant rights of a normal jury trial – is a surefire recipe for
another 9-11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to
erect an alternative tribunal system – long established in wartime –
in the first place.

The few critics who acknowledge the existence of the tribunals argue
they aren't sufficient. They "provided due process in form, but not in
substance," as Newsday put it. That view is shared by a
Carter-appointed liberal judge, but an earlier decision by a
Bush-appointed judge upheld the tribunals. In the end, courts will
almost certainly affirm the legality of the Gitmo tribunals, which, as
noted, were modeled after the due-process standards described in the
Hamdi decision.

That ruling, may I remind you, addressed the detention of a U.S.
citizen as an enemy combatant. As former Attorney General William Barr
noted last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
"Obviously, if these procedures are sufficient for American citizens,
they are more than enough for foreign detainees."