AP: Guards Drag Gitmo Detainee Into Court

From an outraged Associated Press:

[The photo the AP included with this story:] In this image reviewed by the U.S. Military, a U.S. Army soldier looks through binoculars while standing on a guard tower at Camp 4 in the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba, Tuesday, May 13, 2008.

US guards drag Afghan detainee to war-crimes court

By DAVID McFADDEN, Associated Press Writer

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - An Afghan detainee was dragged from his cell to his first pretrial hearing at Guantanamo on Wednesday, then refused to participate, telling the judge he felt “helpless.”

Mohammed Kamin joined a growing detainee boycott of the war-crimes trials at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base in southeast Cuba. The military judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, said Kamin tried to bite and spit on a guard on the way to the courtroom.

In his first public appearance since arriving at Guantanamo in 2004, Kamin wore a heavy beard and the orange prison uniform reserved for noncompliant prisoners, his ankles shackled above his sneakers.

Kamin is accused of placing missiles near U.S.-occupied areas in Afghanistan. He allegedly trained as an al-Qaida operative in 2003 and spied on American military bases before he was captured later that year…

Kamin became the sixth detainee to announce a boycott of the war-crimes trials. Only one inmate, Canadian Omar Khadr, is fully cooperating with his defense team.

If convicted, Kamin faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The U.S. military says it plans to prosecute roughly 80 of the 270 men imprisoned at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to terrorism, the Taliban or al-Qaida.

None of the cases have actually gone to trial before the tribunals, known as military commissions, that were created by the Bush administration in 2006 after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier system as unconstitutional.

The only conviction has come through a plea agreement with David Hicks, who was returned home to serve a nine-month prison sentence in his native Australia.

“War crimes court”? Where did that come from?

(Maybe the AP is thinking about what it is dreaming for most of the Bush administration.)

Let’s see, these detainees have been given Constitutional rights unheard of for prisoners of war who do not fit the Geneva Conventions — being terrorists.

But now they can’t even be made to attend their own trials? When every day people are dragged into court for jay walking?

Of course the AP is, as always, on the side of their allies the terrorists. Indeed, any enemy of our country.

They are nothing if not consistent — and despicable.

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