A Guantanamo Detainee Transferred To New York For Trial

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Jun 9 2009, 8:57 am by Marc Ambinder

A Guantanamo Detainee Transferred To New York For Trial

In an early-morning news release, the Justice Department announced that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Guantanamo Bay detainee since 2006, had been transferred to the custody of corrections officials in New York City and will stand trial for the 1998 embassy bombing in Tanzania. He's the first Guantanamo Bay inmate to be granted a federal court trial by the administration after a review of the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Task Review.

Ghailani appears in court this morning to face 286 separate counts stemming from his March 2001 indictment for terrorism and murder. Eric Holder, the attorney general, said in a statement that the "Justice Department has a long history of securely detaining and successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal justice system, and we will bring that experience to bear in seeking justice in this case." An accompanying fact sheet asserts that there are 216 people with ties to the "nexus" of international terrorism in federal custody.

Notice the date that Ghailani arrived at Guantanamo: 2006 -- that's after the reign of enhanced interrogation techniques had ended...after the torture that extracted (lots of bogus information and some accurate information) from his fellow detainees was put to an end. There was plenty of collateral information about Ghailani's involvement in the embassy bombings, and so the decision to grant him an Article III trial was probably one of the easier calls the administration had to make.

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Good move: The Obama administration on Tuesday transferred its first Guantánamo detainee to U.S. soil by having U.S. marshals move a Tanzanian man from Guantánamo to New York City for trial on capital terror charges. A predawn Justice Department statem... [Read More]

Comments (1)

samX June 9, 2009 9:51 AM

"after the torture that extracted (lots of bogus information and some accurate information) from his fellow detainees..."

You point this out as if to discredit the torture on the quality of output front. Asking nicely probably yields 10x as much bogus information. Asking firmly probably yields 20x as much bogus information. Waterboarding, etc. apparently yielded valuable information. Which was the better method in terms of information being provided?

I think if you want to make a case you should probably make the moral argument (although some people really enjoy making the case that you "can't legislate morality", whatever that's supposed to mean)

I'm not saying I'm in favor of what was done. I lean both ways depending on the day. But it gets a bit annoying to see these snide backhand comments that on the face are written to supposedly be balanced, but seem a bit intellectually dishonest.