I'm disgusted by what AmeriKa has become!
"Dozens of Afghan men who were previously held by the United States at Bagram Air Base and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are now being tried here in secretive Afghan criminal proceedings based mainly on allegations forwarded by the American military.
The prisoners are being convicted and sentenced to as much as 20 years’ confinement in trials that typically run between half an hour and an hour, said human rights investigators who have observed them. One early trial was reported to have lasted barely 10 minutes, an investigator said.
The prosecutions are based in part on a security law promulgated in 1987, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
So Bush's "liberation" is using a SOVIET LAW to try Afghans?!
Meet the new boss, 'eh?
Witnesses do not appear in court and cannot be cross-examined. There are no sworn statements of their testimony.
Instead, the trials appear to be based almost entirely on terse summaries of allegations that are forwarded to the Afghan authorities by the United States military. Afghan security agents add what evidence they can, but the cases generally center on events that sometimes occurred years ago in war zones that the authorities may now be unable to reach.
“These are no-witness paper trials that deny the defendants a fundamental fair-trial right to challenge the evidence and mount a defense,” said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First who has studied the proceedings. “So any convictions you get are fundamentally flawed.”
The head of Afghanistan’s national intelligence agency, Amrullah Saleh, said his investigators did their best to develop their own evidence. But he added that the Afghan judicial system remained crippled by problems more than six years after the fall of the Taliban.
“This is Afghanistan,” he said. Referring to the Afghan trials, he added, “I am equally critical of that procedure, but who is supposed to fix it?”
Since 2002 the Bush administration has pressed foreign governments to prosecute the Guantánamo prisoners from their countries as a condition of the men’s repatriation. But many of those governments — including such close American allies as Britain — have objected, saying the American evidence would not hold up in their courts....
“The files provided by U.S. authorities and the information in them would never have been admissible in a U.S. court or even a military commission in Guantánamo,” said Jonathan Horowitz, an investigator for One World Research, a public-interest investigations firm in New York that also monitored the Afghan trials."So let's send them back to Afghanistan and railroad them!
The unfortunate part is, MOST OF THESE GUYS are INNOCENTS!!!!
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Also see: Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/The First Abu Ghraib
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Perversion
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Dilawar and Habibullah
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Chamber of Horrors
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/American Amnesty
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Bagram
Afghanistan Torture Chamber
