Back to Military Commissions is the option it took. And that news has furnished critics with a large, loud microphone.
Lawyers who are intimately familiar with the Military Commission system say it is not designed to produce justice; it is designed to produce convictions. They call it a second-class justice system.
Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, told us, "In more than nine years since President Bush authorized military commissions, we've conducted a total of five trials and generated nothing but universal condemnation. We're long past the question of whether we could do them to one of whether we should.
Putting lipstick on this pig is not going to convince anyone that she's been transformed into lady justice."
He added: "The 2009 version of the Military Commissions Act is a good example of the phrase "lipstick on a pig.' It provides a few enhancements so President Obama can publicly embrace a process he longed condemned and at least make an argument that he hasn't totally abandoned the principles he speaks so eloquently about but has a hard time practicing. "
"I believe there was a time when military commissions, if done right, could have been credible, but that ship sailed a long time ago. We're like the little boy who kept crying wolf: we've reformed the military commissions over and over and over for 11 years and each time we've assured the world that this time, unlike the other times we said we'd made it right, it really is justice. The world called male bovine manure on that claim years ago and no amount of spit-shine is going to make anyone believe it's suddenly pretty and doesn't reek."
Another GITMO veteran, Darrell J. Vandeveld, who resigned his appointment as a prosecutor before a Guantanamo military commission because of a serious ethical issue, told us, "Right after the President issued the order to close the prison, nothing good will come out of Guantanamo for years. Nothing has been accomplished during this hiatus except to demonstrate that military commissions are inferior, deeply-flawed "courts,' that have delivered, in the few cases tried, inferior justice and utterly inferior results. Ghailani will likely receive a life sentence; Omar Khadr will likely be a free man in less than two years. The prior administration's politicization of the military is unprecedented, and, as we see, ruinous. The current administration is only rejoining this fin de siecle circus."
David Frakt also has equally serious doubts about the legitimacy of the Military Commissions. It was Frakt who, in 2008, challenged the role of chief prosecutor Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann in choosing his client, Mohammed Jawad, for trial.
Frakt argued that Hartmann had --exercised unlawful command influence."
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