In Selling Its Version of the "War on Terror," Obama Is Adopting Bush's Playbook

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2009.

In other words, Judge Leon ruled that Muaz al-Alawi could continue to be held because, despite traveling to Afghanistan to fight other Muslims before September 11, 2001, “contend[ing] that he had no association with al-Qaeda,” and stating that “his support for and association with the Taliban was minimal and not directed at US or coalition forces,” he was still in Afghanistan when that conflict morphed into a different war following the US-led invasion in October 2001. As Leon admitted in his ruling, “Although there is no evidence of petitioner actually using arms against US or coalition forces, the Government does not need to prove such facts in order for petitioner to be classified as an enemy combatant under the definition adopted by the Court.” In the new world of Obama’s Justice Department, all that needs changing are the words “enemy combatants” -- to “Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants” -- and the conclusion is the same.

I am, therefore, bitterly disappointed by the Obama administration’s cosmetic tinkering with its predecessor’s supposed justification for holding prisoners at Guantánamo, as it appears, at heart, to endorse the lawless policies introduced by the Bush administration, and also to perpetuate some of its most damaging errors. In spite of claims by the Justice Department that its position “draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress,” the Obama administration has, in reality, wholeheartedly endorsed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the founding document of the “War on Terror”), has failed to demonstrate that it has any willingness to pour scorn on the Bush administration’s claims that prisoners can be held without being either criminal suspects or prisoners of war, has endorsed its predecessor’s decision to equate the Taliban with al-Qaeda, even though there was never any justification for doing so, has overlooked the fact that the majority of the prisoners were bought for bounties (PDF) and were never screened according to the Geneva Conventions, has ignored the fact that the evidence against them (whether of “substantial” support or not) was often extracted through the use of torture, coercion or bribery, and has also defended the Bush administration’s self-proclaimed right to detain demonstrably peripheral figures in the Afghan conflict as “terror suspects.”

For a final demonstration of the absurdity the Obama administration’s position, I’d like to return to another of the cases reviewed by Judge Leon, that of Ghaleb Nasser al-Bihani, a Yemeni who had served as a cook for the Taliban and an affiliated group of Arab recruits. In a verdict that also fits with the new administration’s disturbingly loose definition of “substantial support,” Judge Leon ruled that “faithfully serving in an al-Qaeda-affiliated fighting unit that is directly supporting the Taliban by helping prepare the meals of its entire fighting force is more than sufficient to meet this Court’s definition of ‘support,’” and added, “After all, as Napoleon was fond of pointing out, ‘An army marches on its stomach.’”

To gauge how wrong this is, we need only compare al-Bihani’s case to that of another Yemeni prisoner, Salim Hamdan. Last August, Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was tried at Guantánamo in the Military Commissions conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers (including, in particular, his legal counsel David Addington), sentenced and sent home in November to serve the last few weeks of a five-month sentence delivered by a military jury. As I wrote when Judge Leon made his ruling about al-Bihani, “Hamdan is now a free man, whereas al-Bihani, a man who never met Osama bin Laden, let alone driving him around, has just been told, by a judge in a U.S. federal court, that the government is entitled to hold him forever because he cooked dinner for the Taliban.”

See more stories tagged with: habeas corpus, afghanistan, barack obama, department of justice, enemy combatants, taliban, al-qaeda, salim hamdan, guantánamo, authorization for use of , richard leon, ghaleb nasser al-bihani

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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