Australian David Hicks is set to be the first Guantanamo Bay kidnapee finally given a pseudo-legal hearing under the new Military Commissions Act. The old system was declared illegal and unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
Hicks is getting this pseudo-trial due because great pressure to do so has been put on the US government by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of President Bush. That the first hearing is due to political pressure, not any legalistic rationale, hardly reflects well on the credibility of such tribunals. Justice is not supposed to be politicized, but the Bush administration has long been unaware of this.
One of the most damning critics of this system is someone who works intimately within it. Air Force reserve Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley is one of the lawyers appointed to defend Gitmo detainees. She told the conservative UK Telegraph newspaper that the tribunals are designed to achieve convictions without allowing defendants a full and fair trial.
In an interview with the BBC, she also called the system un-American and compared them to McCarthyism.
The lieutenant colonel's words, not mine.
When I googled her name, I came up with this story about her work from the official site of the Willow Grove Air Force Station. It's heartwarmingly entitled, "Officer defends alleged terrorist -- and truth, justice and the American way."
Interestingly, her criticisms of the un-American legitimacy of the whole system were not mentioned.
She also told the German magazine Der Spiegel that "These trials are political."
Lt. Col. Bradley doesn't believe that she will be able to achieve anything for her client before the military commission. "If you accept their rules you've lost," she says. "We must take political and legal steps against the trial procedures."
The German magazine also interviewed another officer assigned to work at Gitmo.
Lt. Col. Thomas Bogar is a tax attorney assigned to defend one of Gitmo's (sort of) accused. A tax lawyer representing an alleged terrorism case. Why would military assign someone to the case trained in a completely unrelated field of law? Why would they do that if not because, in Lt. Col. Bradley's words, 'the tribunals are designed to achieve convictions without allowing defendants a full and fair trial'?
Bogar and his team don't know if Zahir [the detainee] is telling them the truth, but they believe that the evidence against him is shaky. The classified Zahir file contains many unsigned witness accounts, making it impossible for the attorney to determine who the witnesses are. Anonymous evidence of this nature would not even be allowed in a case before a normal court-martial, but it is being permitted before the military tribunal.
This is pretty telling. Since the pseudo-trial is held in complete secrecy, there's no reason to have the further secrecy of anonymous evidence.
No leftist, he has even campaigned for the Republicans.
Yet Lt. Col. Bogar is at a loss to understand how the military tribunals can be permitted to use the unexamined testimony of anonymous witnesses... He also has trouble accepting the notion that it should be left up to a judge to decide whether testimony obtained through torture can be used in the trials.
Perhaps the most revealing fact reported by Der Spiegel is this: Since establishing the camp in 2002, the Bush administration has released close to 300 of the roughly 770 prisoners with the explanation that they were "no longer enemy combatants" -- as if being imprisoned at Guantanamo had somehow had a cathartic effect on them. There have been many suicide attempts at the camp since then, three of them successful.
Let's forget, for a moment, that the very principle of an 'enemy combatant' is probably the most brazen and outrageous claim of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the history of the world.
The Bush administration discovered that hundreds of kidnapees really were innocent, even without even the minimal rigor of a pseudo-trial. That means hundreds of innocent men were held in this black hole with no hope, mentally tortured by their experience of being kidnaped for years and imprisoned for no reason. How much do you think this made them love America? Do you think they are going to go home and tell their friends and family how great the USA really is?
'Why do they hate America?', you often hear proclaimed. There are many reasons, some legitimate, some illegitimate. But mockeries of justice like Guantanamo Bay make things ten times worse. The whole idea of kidnaping people in distant lands and either giving them kangaroo trials or no trial at all is a disgrace to and betrayal of the ideals and beliefs all Americans claim to believe in.
Don't believe me. Believe the American military officers who know how the system really works, who know it infinitely better than you or I.
Note: Interestingly, there were several reports about these officers' criticisms in the foreign media but I couldnt' find any in the 'liberal' American media.
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