Israeli Lawyers Support Boumediene

Helena Cobban tells about Israeli lawyers who supported the Boumediene position in the Gitmo case. The Israelis say that our treatment of Guantanamo prisoners is worse than Israeli treatment of Palestinean prisoners.

Cobban writes

Human rights organizations have frequently criticized several aspects of the Israeli system for military-judicial review of detention orders-- including the ruling the Israeli Supreme Court gave some years ago that states that "moderate pressure" is a permitted way of extracting "information" and does not taint evidence presented to these review bodies. allowed those engaging in the crime of torture to provide an ill-defined "necessity" defense for their acts. (See first comment below.) So I would not say that the Israeli system is anywhere near perfect.

But it is sobering to hear these Israeli specialists telling our Supreme Court how much worse the Guantanamo system is.

The Israeli lawyers wrote,

these detainee rights are "necessary elements of the response to terrorism in a resilient democratic society governed by law."

Some of us have very reasonable questions about the extent to which the U.S. remains a democratic society governed by law. The democracy part is questionable, given our presidential primary non-system and the electoral college 2000 fiasco. Governed by law is questionable, given Bush's refusal to follow laws he disagrees with, as well as the illegal surveillance scandal.

This all reads like 'same old, same old', even to me as I write it. These problems are not new. But they have not gone away.