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Hina Shamsi: Mohammad Jawad was captured when he was a teenager. This is someone who grew
up in a refugee camp.He's functionally illiterate, and he was captured and accused of participating
in a grenade attack against two US Service members and their Afghan interpreter. He was
forced into a confession under threat of death and that became the basis for the US decision
to prosecute him for war crimes. Darrel Vandeveld: He was hooded and thrown
down a flight of stairs. Once he arrived at Guantanamo, he attempted to commit suicide,
and a behavioral psychologist decided that that would be a good time to subject Mr. Jawad
to sleep deprivation. He had only known imprisonment and mistreatment since he was 16 or 17, so
you can imagine why he tried to commit suicide and why he was vulnerable at that point. Before
the interrogations, he was crying and asking for his mother. WHen I realized that I could
not fulfill my ethical obligations as a prosecutor, I resigned, and I resigned out of conscience.
Hina Shamsi: The New York Times called Mr.Jawad's case emblematic of everything that is wrong
with the military commission system. For example, his is a case predicated on evidence obtained
through torture and coerced evidence. What our motion does is to challenge the basis
for the government's detention of Mr. Jawad, as well as its basis for prosecuting him.
When President Obama instructed that military commission proceedings be halted, it was a
critical first step in an end to a deeply unconstitutional process, one that should
never, never be used again. Now, Mr. Jawad's case is about the adequacy of the evidence
that the US has to continue to detain him. For the government to continue to fight independent
federal court review of the basis for Mr. Jawad's detention is ludicrous in face of
the facts that the Attorney General himself said during his nomination confirmation hearings,
that the military commission system does not comply with due process.
Mr. Jawad's former prosecutor, Lt. Col. Vandeveld served in military operations in Afghanistan
and in Iraq. His 14-page declaration on behalf of Mr. Jawad, in support of his habeas petition,
is a truly extraordinary document. He says, "Had I been returned to Afghanistan or Iraq
and had I encountered Mohammed Jawad in either one of those hostile lands, where two of my
friends had been killed in action, I have no doubt at all, non, that Mr. Jawad would
pose no threat whatsoever to me. As former prosecutor, a now repentant prosecutor, six
years is long enough for a boy of 16 to serve in virtual solitary confinement in a distant
land for reasons he may never fully understand." Mr. Jawad's former prosecutor is asking the
court to set him free. There should be no question left that that's exactly what the
United States should do.