Frakt also argued, during his challenge of Hartmann's unlawful influence, that the Prosecution had failed to release important records to the Defense, and that this showed that the process through which Jawad was charged was rushed and without proper preparation.
Frakt argued that Jawad had been subjected to: --pointless and sadistic treatment [in a] bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture."
Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a public interest law firm that has mobilized dozens of pro-bono private sector lawyers to defend Guantanamo detainees, told us, "We think President Obama has made a major mistake in getting behind military commissions. This is a second class system of justice for the Arab and Muslim men in Guantanamo. This second class system will likely be struck down by the courts and certainly will subject the US to more international condemnation
for these violations of human rights."
And Amnesty's Tom Parker weighed in with a critique of a speech on The Supreme Court's decision on 29 June 2006, when The Court reversed the ruling of the Court of Appeals, holding that President George W. Bush did not have authority to set up the war crimes tribunals and finding the special military commissions illegal under both military justice law and the Geneva Conventions
"There is simply no way to reconcile Barack Obama's embrace of military commissions with the core criticisms made about Bush's system. Just consider what was said in the past about Bush's military commissions by key Obama officials, Bush critics generally and, on occasion, even by Obama himself, and decide for yourself if this is anything other than a replica of one of the worst and most extremist abuses of the Bush era".
"One of the most definitive claims in this regard was from Obama himself, who -- at the height of the presidential campaign last August, after Salim Hamdan was convicted of minor charges by a Guantanamo military commission -- issued a statement that included this:
"That the Hamdan trial -- the first military commission trial with a guilty verdict since 9/11 -- took several years of legal challenges to secure a conviction for material support for terrorism underscores the dangerous flaws in the Administration's legal framework. It's time to better protect the American people and our values by bringing swift and sure justice to terrorists through our courts and our Uniform Code of Military Justice."
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