Phillip Buck Featured in WSJ
Underground railroad worker Phillip Buck, recently released from a Chinese prison, has told Melanie Kirkpatrick about his activities, his arrest, and even his new identity:
Pastor Buck is nothing if not determined. In 2002, while in a Southeast Asian country with a group of refugees he had guided there, his apartment in Yanji city, in northeast China, was raided. Nineteen refugees were captured and a copy of his passport was confiscated. With his identity now compromised, Mr. Buck returned to the U.S. and underwent legal proceedings to change his name. John Yoon, the name he was born with, was dead; Phillip Buck was born.
The new Pastor Buck returned to China, where, on May 25, 2005, he was arrested and eventually convicted of the crime of helping illegal immigrants. Thanks to the intervention of the U.S. government, he was deported before he could be sentenced.
He Kirkpatrick also relates the tale of a North Korean camp survivor who accompanied him Buck at the interview:
One morning at roll call, he recounts, one of his cellmates, a man who had been badly beaten during the night, was too sick to get out of bed. The guards ordered the prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him. “I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn’t buried him,” the escapee says. The name of the dead man was Kim Young Jin. The name of the prison is Chong Jin. Says the man who escaped: “I am very glad to be here, and tell the people in America how life in North Korea really is.”
Well, yes, but for the fact that doing so might deceive some people out of the idea that Gitmo is the worst place on earth, a theory put into perspective by my friend and co-author, Gordon Cucullu.
I like what Onefreekorea stands for in terms of the pressure it puts on NK, but the author’s hypocrasy in regard to “gitmo” weakens his standing considerably. Guantanamo Bay is a gulag, a blight on america and a tarnish on america’s supposed “moral leadership” in the free world. This Christmas lets reflect for a moment on one of the men at Gitmo, who has been there for 5 years without a trial, whose mental health has disintergrated to the point where he can no longer speak to his own father. God Bless America.
http://radar.smh.com.au/archives/2006/12/does_david_hick.html
That editorial was very persuasive … except for its absence of any substance, any information about what Hicks was attempting to do that landed him in that prison, what actual “torture” he’d undergone, what credible evidence supported the allegations, or what on earth we are to do with someone like David Hicks, who, as I will show, aspired to help mass murder civilians both before and after 9/11. Now, to me, “gulag” is at least implicitly a value judgment about several things, including the conditions there, the guilt or innocence of the prisoners, the numbers held, and the purpose for which they’re held. If you throw those judgments away, you can dull the meaning of “gulag” enough to extend to include a day spent waiting in line at the DMV with nothing but a vending machine and old copies of “Redbook” for nourishment and leisure. “Gulag” does have an actual meaning, however, and as long as real gulags exist, we continue to have a use for that meaning. It originates in the Soviet acronym for the state corporation that imprisoned tens of millions of innocent people in camps and worked millions of them to death. “Gulag” is a place where a government mass murders innocent people. Gitmo is not a gulag. Camp 22 and Yodok are.
Those held at Gitmo leave too fat to wear the clothes they wore going in. I would certainly choose the conditions there over confinement in an ordinary Japanese prison, a French prison, a Saudi prison, an Egyptian prison, or an Australian refugee detention camp any day. Above all, I’d choose it over the prisons on the other side of Cuba that that Human Rights Industry and the UN have long forgotten. For that matter, I’d choose them over Marion or Rikers Island. Sensory deprivation? Gee, that’s rather unpleasant, until you consider the alternative — would you deny the compelling reasons we have for knowing what these people know, or what they’re planning? And while I would have preferred quicker trial procedure (and the hangings that ought to have followed for many of those found guilty, possibly to include Hicks), those were held up by litigation on the prisoners’ behalf (see Hamdan v. Rumsfeld).
For your charge of hypocrisy to stick, you need to draw a valid comparison between what amounts to a rather spartan place where homicidal killers of innocents are kept from doing their evil work and the mass imprisonment of men, women and kids for perceived thoughcrimes by their relatives. Please do try to make that comparison, but don’t bother me until you’ve actually done your homework first.
As for Hicks’s allegations of torture — he claims, among other things, to have been beaten with rifle butts — one must consider them in light of other known facts: (a) Hicks and his comrades are trained to make false claims of torture, (b) Hicks actually translated AQ training manuals into English, (c) Hicks is the ultimate source of all of the allegations, (d) little of what Hicks alleges actually took place at Gitmo, and (e) as a former Army JAG, I find the charges facially suspect. So I have a bias — the opposite of your tendency to believe al-Qaeda detainees — but hopefully, only mine is based on actual experience.
What do you actually know about Mr. Hicks, and what he opted to become a part of? Ever read his charge sheet?
If you can identify any person at Yodok or Camp 22 who trained in kidnapping, sniping, or “urban assault” methods, or who helped teach terrorists how to stake out his countrymen while traveling, I will withdraw my sympathy from that person (but not from the wife, children, and parents imprisoned with him).
So, to sum up:
– Gitmo here, Camp 22 here.
– David Hicks, getting at least what he deserves, and far less than this pissed-off father would give him for conspiring to kill innocent women and kids. North Korean gulag inmates, innocent people who really are being starved and tortured to death by the hundreds of thousands by their own government.
If you can’t make a rational distinction between the murder of innocents and a society’s self-defense against the murder of innocents, not only are you bludgeoning the language to destroy its inconvenient precision, you cause us to suspect that something other than compassion is driving your sympathy for an evil that will never coexist with the rest of us.
You’re a hypocrite. You say Hick’s “allegations” of torture, but when you lay out the charge sheet and talk about his crimes, you talk about them as though they are not alleged, but actually happened. You talk like a trial lawyer (“who, as I will show, aspired to help mass murder civilians” etc). You even have a charge sheet. But I’ve yet to see a trial. If you can prove it so persuasively here why can’t the US government? Why no trial?
GT might not be the worst prison in the world (and you seem to delight in this point as though it makes it ok – we’re better than the old U.S.S.R and North Korea!) but it is certainly a gulag. You stumble on this ethical matter throughout your argument, and it renders all your points invalid. “For your charge of hypocrasy to stick, you need to draw a valid comparison”…No I don’t. A gulag is a gulag, whether it is a very bad one or a nightmarish one. The US has certainly fallen to depths if it needs to argue points by comparing its own work to that of the old soviet block or the current NK state.
Thomas Friedman argued it best when he said the gulag tag was fair because Gitmo is one in a chain of shadowy camps (including Abu Ghraib and Bagram), all with allegations of torture (many proven), all secretive, none with any accountability in law.
Don’t talk to me about evil and compasion when you defend an administration that cannot bide by the simple tenets of the geneva conventions. And don’t try to argue that the prisoners are not entitled to these protections because they are enemy combatants and not POWs either, because your government already tried that and failed in the Supreme Court about six months ago. I doubt you’ll have more success.
As for your dismissal of such things as sensory deprivation (“Gee, thats rather unpleasant”) I’d like to se how you handled a day in solitary confinement with no knowledge of when you’d be released, let alone 5 years. Go do some research on long term solitary confinement and its effects and then come back here and tell me it doesn’t amount to serious torture.
The US can do better. Put the man on trial, get it done with, practice what you preach, stop wagging your finger at the world and talking abouty “evil” and “liberty” and the rule of law when you do not act with such values yourself.
You’re a self-hating nutter who can’t morally distinguish a gas chamber from a fart in a crowded elevator.
And again, had you read my response, you’d have known that do-gooder lawyers suing on behalf of the terrorists stayed the military commission proceedings. That’s why no trial. I would have loved to have seen some, erm, suspended sentenced carried out by now on some of the guys who carried out 9/11: Binalsibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, etc.
Ah, but you probably don’t even believe al Qaeda had anything to do with 9/11.
Do-gooder lawyers believe in the rule of law. The rule of law is the foundation of civic society. You canot pick and choose who to apply law to, no matter how heinous their crimes might appear. The military commision does not bide by the rule of law. It abides by the decisions of men who do not need to have any legal training whatsoever. They may admit “evidence” procured under torture. There is no appeal process. A guilty verdict is reached even if 2 of the 5 members find the detainee innocent. Your military comision is a joke, a rubber stamp process that no other first world country would dream of deeming fit for use on a prisoner. That is why proceedings were stayed. Is it so wrong to want a fair trial? If the evidence, as I pointed out earlier is so compelling, put him on trial, not in a kangaroo court. Or is it possible that the man is not actualy guilty at all?
Prove that you are better than the terrorists. Show the world that you have moral fortitude; that where they kill and condemn indiscriminently, you apply fair, unpredjudiced law indiscriminantly. You will end up much stronger because of it.
I’ve tried explaing this to you as simply as possible. I see your arguments have degenerated into insult hurling. You say I am self hating and a nutter. How so? Please explain why the belief in practicing what you preach and not bending law to suit your own purposes is self-hating. I fail to see the link. And for the record I do believe that Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11 (what this has to do with the current argument is anyone’s guess).
For anyone out there who might know, I am curious as to how the treatment of the detainees and the rights they have had recognized by the military compare, both on paper and in practice, to the way US service members can expect to be treated by their peers in any judicial process. While there are some unsettled issues regarding the detainees, from what I have gathered their treatment seems to be comparable to what our military convicts, both before and after conviction, are afforded. The comparison might not be what I think, but nevertheless our military members have never been afforded the same recognition of rights that US civilians normally receive.
Yet, there is a stupendous willingness to ignore real torture and human rights issues like what is taking place in North Korea as soon as anyone tries to shift the focus off of Gitmo. Stunning! I understand that the reason our service members have a different set of rules for investigation of crimes, trials, and incarceration is to help preserve a necessary measure of stability but why aren’t people willing to apply that same reasoning to detainees? The only answer I can come up with is that the people hooting and hollering for gitmo “rights” don’t really give a rip about those detainees rights, otherwise they would be consistent in their call for reforming human rights around the world. These people detract from real human rights issues and focus on red herrings like gitmo only because of their hatred of conservative ideology. That’s it and that’s all it ever was.
To simply Mr. Chips’s point, if VM really cared about human rights, he’d mention Yodok, Darfur, or prison conditions in any one of the places I mentioned above, where the intensity of suffering and numbers of those afflicted is infintely greater. The exclusive interest in finding fault with America and defending its would-be killers suggests self-loathing.
I’d call hypocrisy, but emotional blindness is a better diagnosis. VM so badly wants to belief that Gitmo is Mauthausen than he didn’t even bother to look up the Military Commissions Act before typing.
3/5 is not enough to find someone guilty. You need 2/3 or more, which means at least 4 if the panel has 5 members. Hint: never try to misrepresent military law to someone who’s tried at least two dozen cases as a JAG.
Statements obtained by torture are not admissible.
You intentionally distort my point about do-gooder lawyers. You’re the one who would spring Hicks — despite the gravity of the charges — because he’s been held for so long without trial, ignoring the fact that he’s been held without trial because his own lawyers have stayed the proceedings in litigation for all these years. That’s known as circular reasoning. You can’t stall your own trial and then bitch about not having your day in court.
I like this:
I’ll need your help with this one, Van. Maybe you can hook up with the boys who got their hands on Nick Berg, PFC Keith Maupin, Daniel Pearl, Paul Johnson, PFC Kristian Menchaca, or PFC Thomas Tucker(maybe that does not outrage you, since you never mentioned it) and tell us how conditions of captivity have improved since then.
Documentation is essential, so make sure we get it on video. The defense rests. Good day, sir.
Again, why should I mention Yodok, Darfur etc when the subject of this topic is Gitmo? Likewise pointing out what animals did to Nick Berg etc. Do you consider Darfur a good yardstick against which to compare the treatment of your own detainees? Do you think the fact that some subhuman executed Nick Berg its ok to torture your own prisoners? I thought we already went over this ground re the USSR and NK. Gitmo is not OK because worse prisons and judicial processes (or lack of them) exist. Understand that clearly.
As for the “exclusive interst in finding fault with america” rubbish and the suggestion that it implies self-loathing, wrong on both counts. I’m not American, I’m Australian. Australia is perhaps the US’s most loyal ally; my own grandfather fought with americans in the pacific against the Japanese. My neighbour fought with americans in Vietnam. Countless other Australians fought with US servicement in Korea, Iraq, Afganistan (and still do) I believe in america and the US alliance, thats why I find this stuff nauseating.
I also would have thought as a JAG you’d be more concerned with the state of affairs as they currently exist. It looks like your superiors tend to agree with me. Here’s a cut and paste from the New Yorker:
—In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,†Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.†The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.†They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.—-
And who is talking about springing Hicks? I’m suggesting a fair trial. If he’s found guilty in a fair trial, justice is done and I’ll be happy with it. There’s no circular logic involved in refusing to put your life in the hands of men with no legal training, who Your military commission is not fair. You are correct with the 2/3rds for guilty (If I was under trial at your kangaroo court that would probably mean case closed right?) but you’re incorrect re torture. From Amnesty International:
——-The Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), an administrative review body consisting of panels of three military officers, was established to determine whether the detainees were “enemy combatantsâ€. The detainees were not provided with lawyers to assist them in this process and secret evidence could be used against them. Many detainees boycotted the process, which by the end of the year had determined that more than 200 detainees were “enemy combatants†and two were not and could be released. The authorities also announced that all detainees confirmed as “enemy combatants†would have a yearly review of their cases before an Administrative Review Board (ARB) to determine if they should still be held. Again, detainees would not have access to legal counsel or to secret evidence. Both the CSRT and the ARB could draw on evidence extracted under torture or other coercion. In December, the Pentagon announced that it had conducted its first ARB.—–
And here (amnesty international):
——-The rules of the military commissions do not rule out the admission as evidence of statements made as a result of torture or other ill-treatment. During the March 2006 proceedings against Ali Hamza al Bahlul, the Presiding Officer in the case stated that he could not absolutely rule out admitting evidence obtained under torture.
Article 15 of the UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the USA is a state party, prohibits statements obtained as a result of torture being used as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made. US law prohibits evidence obtained from coerced confessions being used in a criminal proceeding. Yet military commissions can make use of such information as evidence. (6) ——
I’ve also suggested that 5 years of solitary confinement counts as torture. I’ll stick to that.
Other complaints with your miltary comission:
-The military commissions fall far short of international standards for fair trial, including those set out in Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the USA is a state party. Regardless of superficial procedural changes introduced in August 2005 they flagrantly violate fair trial rights:
-They are not independent of the executive. They are executive bodies – not independent courts – whose rules are determined by the executive and whose personnel are selected by the executive. As such, they violate the right to be heard by an independent tribunal.
-The right of appeal to a higher court is severely limited. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia Circuit is the only higher court with the jurisdiction in the military commission process but it is only allowed to review whether decisions of the commissions adhere to their own flawed rules. There is also a right to appeal on the standards and procedures of the commissions, but only “to the extent the Constitution and laws of the United States are applicable”.
-The right to a lawyer of one’s choice and to an effective defence is severely restricted. Defendants are assigned US military lawyers. Detainees may request another military lawyer or a civilian lawyer. Civilian lawyers must be US citizens, and have passed stringent security clearance. Civilian lawyers are not guaranteed access to classified information or presence at “closed commission proceedings”.
-In addition, the US government does not meet the costs of civilian defence lawyers for detainees. The procedures governing military commissions make no provision for defendants to defend themselves. For example, Ali Hamza Sulayman al Bahlul, when first appearing before a military commission in August 2004, expressed his desire to represent himself or, failing that, to be represented by a Yemeni lawyer. When pre-trial hearings resumed for him in 2006, he was denied this request and therefore decided to boycott the proceedings.(4)
Secret evidence, which defendants do not see and cannot challenge, can be admitted.
-Defendants can be excluded from parts of the proceedings.
-Only foreign nationals are eligible for such trials. This violates the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights.
-The commissions can admit as evidence statements obtained as a result of torture or other ill-treatment
case closed.
Wrong again. The topic of the post and thread is North Korea. That makes you a troll.