Supporters of Federal trials for GITMO detainees noted that virtually no one noticed a terrorist trial in progress, and said the verdict vindicated the U.S. justice system; opponents pointed to the one-out-of-281-count conviction, and fanaticized about Ghailani on parole, enjoying breakfast at McDonalds.
New York Republican Rep. Pete King, who has bitterly opposed Federal trials, called the mixed verdict "a disgraceful miscarriage of justice."
Congress sided with King and the trial's many other opponents. It cut off funding for the transport of any GITMO detainee to the U.S. for any purpose whatever.
Ergo, the Administration is left with only bad options, and not many of those. It can forget about trials altogether. These prisoners will just make up part of the group that, regardless of any other factors, the Administration intends to hold indefinitely. It can continue to try to find countries to host those inmates cleared for release (the largest single group of these is from Yemen; and there is currently a ban on repatriating anyone to Yemen because of the recent reported Al Qaeda activity there). Or it can revert to the quaint system of justice fashioned by the George W. Bush Administration: the Military Commission.
That's the road it is reportedly taking. 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, and now executive director of the Crimes of War Project, told The Public Record, "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."
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."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
