Kollar-Kotelly Orders al-Rabiah Released

« Ralph Peters’ General-Betray-Us Moment

Who Woulda Thought That Dreams Come True »

Kollar-Kotelly Orders al-Rabiah Released
By: Spencer Ackerman Saturday September 26, 2009 8:32 pm	Tweet Share

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s rules on a Guantanamo detainee named Fouad al-Rabiah who filed a habeas petition. The short version:

Al Rabiah’s uncorroborated confessions are not reliable or credible, and that the Government has failed to provide the Court with sufficiently credible and reliable evidence to meet its burden of persuasion. If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah’s indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this Court.

Lizardbreath observes:

If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions [within the decision], we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn’t make any sense. And now we’ve asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

Kollar-Kotelly was chief presiding judge of the FISA Court for seven years, so it’s not like she’s unattentive to intelligence concerns. Indeed, she might be the most qualified judges on the bench to consider al-Rabiah’s petition.

Imagine what it’s like to be in al-Rabiah’s position — tortured into a senseless confession, and then further tortured to make the story clearer, with his tormentors asserting he should never have any redress his entire life long, even after interrogators find his information useless. It’s a closed loop of injustice, in which initial errors are simply justification for compounding them. I never want to hear anyone who would excuse this treatment braying that the crucible of liberty is the difference of a few percentage points in the 30s in a top marginal tax bracket.

1 Comment

Spotlight

One Response to “Kollar-Kotelly Orders al-Rabiah Released”

ekhornbeck September 26th, 2009 at 9:36 pm

Hah!

Scooped by Nedra-

31 Judge criticizes US evidence on Gitmo detainee
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
Fri Sep 25, 6:00 pm ET

WASHINGTON – A federal judge has ordered the release of a Kuwaiti man held at Guantanamo Bay and rebuked the U.S. government for relying on scant evidence, uncredible witnesses and coerced confessions to hold him for more than seven years.

In an opinion declassified Friday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said government attorneys presented a “surprisingly bare” record during four days of classified hearings last month to oppose Fouad Al Rabiah’s request for release from the U.S. naval detention facility in Cuba. She said the aviation engineer is being held almost exclusively on confessions obtained through abusive techniques and that his own interrogators repeatedly concluded were not believable.

“Incredibly, these are the confessions that the government has asked the Court to accept as truthful in this case,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 65-page opinion that was partially redacted to remove classified material. She called the coerced confessions “entirely incredible” and said they “defy belief.”

Weekend News Digest @ DocuDharma

Not that being first is the measure of excellence. Read you all the time. Nedra is a dope.