As some people know, I diverted from focussing my attention on torture in general to covering, to the best of my abilities, the story of Aafia Siddiqui around July of 2008. Since then, I've read everything I could find on her case, on a daily basis, and have written about her on both Humanity Against Crimes, and on the Seminal at FireDogLake.

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/2008/08/one-of-psychological-coercions-that.html

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-letter-to-aclu.html

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/2008/10/does-united-states-torture-women.html

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/2009/07/banning-torture-in-us-courts.html

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7643

In that context, and since I couldn't resolve some of the inconsistencies and figure out how some things could be going on in a Federal District Court and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn (not to mention the Federal Detention Center at Carswell, TX). I subsequently got a hold of the transcript for her competency hearing this past July 6th (with judgment on July 26th), and wrote a piece for Seminal called Can a Terrorist Get A Fair Trial?

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/6885

Everybody wanted to know why I called it that, and not "terror suspect". But from the moment these people show up on a suspicion list, they are no longer human beings in the American justice system, they no longer have a right against excessive bail, they no longer have rights against close confinement, they have no rights to be charged with the crime for which they are really being tried, and the prosecutors can introduce mountains of evidence pre-trial that has nothing to do with what the charges are, and seeks only to convince the judge presiding that the Constitution of the United States does not apply to this one.

Today, in the course of my usual Aafia Siddiqui search, I found an article newly published at Harper's called, The Intelligence Factory: How America makes its enemies disappear, by Petra Bartosiewicz. She has, by dint of a trip to Pakistan and to Afghanistan, and more access than I'd been able to get, done an excellent piece on Aafia Siddiqui and what can be pieced together objectively from records and interviews. She confirms the eerie feeling that nobody is being quite honest, she confirms the four point 24/7 restraints, the 2 weeks of interrogation (her Miranda rights were read in New York, not in Bagram), and lack of consular access when the FBI, always the saints in any good interrogation story, extraordinarily rendered her from Afghanistan to solitary confinement and cavity searches in Brooklyn New York two weeks after two gunshots deprived her of part of her intestines and a lot of her blood. They questioned her less than 24 hours after she'd been cracked open from chest to gut while the whereabouts of her son was unknown to her. Oh, yeah, that saintly "building rapport" FBI.

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082719

I got to searching around to find out what else Ms. Bartosiewicz had done, and came up with this, which confirms and adds miles to what I had written about terrorist suspects, the U.S. courts, and the U.S. pre-trial detention system. It's called A Thousand Little Gitmos, and it makes closing Guantánamo, and even Bagram, look like the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/thousand-little-gitmos

It's really funny. When debates break out over Afghanistan, the world quickly divides into two sides, the pro-war and the anti-war, as Andrew Bacevich labels them. And anyone who thinks neither are right is hooted by both. Now we have the debate over U.S. detainees. There are the civil libertarians, arguing that the U.S. justice system will deal with them quite adequately, we don't need to give up our beliefs and establish offshore abominations for enforced disappearance and torture. There are the national security hawks, who scream blue murder if anyone even suggests affording the prisoners due process, and their scared minions in Congress who ban all access to our shores to people, no matter how innocent, no matter how due in court.

Well, for me, anyway, I remember why Angela Davis ran. And I think both sides had better look to this form of "justice". The justice dispensed to "terrorists" is Kafkaesque in the U.S. right now, and arguments over citizenship are easily rebutted by the treatment Ms. Bartosiewicz describes of an American citizen. I am sickened and horrified to read the competency hearing transcripts, knowing what has been filed before, knowing what has been reported in the papers. And we have a very, very long way to go to find our way back home, even if the doors to Guantánamo were flung open this very instant.

Liberals, in their fantasy land, don't understand that if you don't stand behind Obama, he won't even be able to undue the things Bush did. It boggles my mind. Are you people truly this blind? Splinter into whining groups and Obama can do nothing.

There are a fair number of people, on this blog comment board and elsewhere, who believe that the President should withdraw at all costs, immediately, from Afghanistan. It's well known here that I don't agree with them, and that I try to convince people to look at other alternatives, specifically converting the operation to a civilian one and putting pressure on Pakistan. But I find the idea that they should support a war they vehemently disagree with just to give President Obama "cover" so he can do things "because of POWER", not because they are right, and circle some strange kind of wagons around the guy so he will have what he needs to do the right thing, totally repugnant. No one should be forced to support a war they believe is wrong as a precondition to having a president do the right thing.