Evidence In Terror Cases Said To Be In Chaos

by Peter Finn - January 14, 2009 - Washington Post

A former military prosecutor said in a declaration filed in federal court yesterday that the system of handling evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay is so chaotic that it is impossible to prepare a fair and successful prosecution.

[snip]

Vandeveld and Jawad's attorneys have catalogued a pattern of abuse in the case, including an incident in June in which Jawad was said to have been "beaten, kicked and pepper-sprayed while he was on the ground with his feet and hands in shackles, for allegedly not complying with guards' instructions," according to a filing in federal court.

War is always chaos and evidence collected during a battle will always be gathered in a chaotic manner. Why is this a surprise?

All who have lived through it refer to the "fog of war" for a good reason. War is not like regular daily lives. In war, people are trying to kill you. In war, everyone is under stress. In war, staying alive means that capturing an enemy soldier is not something that starts a careful documentation of the "evidence" but is cause for quickly incapacitating the prisoner and getting back to staying alive and winning the battle.

To actually try individual enemy soldiers captured on the battlefield with all the rights of a civil criminal proceeding is such a stupid and ignorant effort that this article is the absolutely certain and inevitable result.

It was only yesterday that it was reported over 60 POWs that have been released under the pressure to "try them" have already gone back to fighting against us in this Islamo-fascist war against our freedom and economic success. Left wing opponents of the war immediately disputed this claiming it cannot be proved. This is a real war with real enemies who are being captured on the battlefield and for the first time in history being released to kill our troops again due to enemy elements within our own citizens who oppose our efforts at defense and act as a public relations department for our enemies. We even have one a person who is known, beyone all doubt to have attempted to particiapate in 9/11, proposed to be freed, not because they were tortured, but because one prosecutor feels that the sum of their treatment crossed a personal line for that individual. Think I am kidding? Read here.

While incarcerated, many of these enemies prisoners have attacked our soldiers. They then complain that our troops stopping the attacks constitutes attacking them for "not complying with guards instructions."

We are at war. However, as noted, we have a large element in our own nation who consider our own soldiers to be "their enemy". They are global socialists who are sympathetic to the Islamo-fascists who are the focus of our military. Liberal judges among these anti-Americans are leading the efforts to insist every enemy soldier must be tried as if he is innocent. By this action they are taking over the running of the war. The idiocy of allowing our corrupt judges to enhance their power by taking over the running of this war will lead inevitably to our own destruction.

At the end of World War II, the actions of the National Socialist leadership was so egregious that we tried them in court rooms for "crimes against humanity". In previous wars the victors did not use such a formal process but simply killed the defeated leadership. We used the trial process in an attempt to say we were better than that. It was presumed "more moral" to use a formal process. Yet the evolution of that concept has led to the idiotic belief that every enemy soldier deserves to have a trial. The burden this places on our soldiers is self defeating.

Few soldiers, recognizing the chaos on the battlefield, will ever do their duty to win the war with enthusiasm, when the very practical rules of that effort guarantee their actions can be used by our enemy to later make him the "bad guy" in a trial where the accused has all the "rights" and the soldier who did his job is simply one more victim of our contemptible judges in their lust for power.

In their pretense of seeking "perfect justice" our idiot judges have once again simply guaranteed that the real "bad guys" get off with technicalities. It is time to start a different war. An internal war to kill the biggest enemy our nation faces. Totalitarian judges.