
by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
5 June 2009
If President Obama is serious about ever closing Guantánamo, and bringing justice to any of the 239 men still held there, the chaotic events on Monday, in the first hearing of the Military Commission trial system since the President’s four-month freeze on proceedings expired, should persuade him that all that awaits him, if he proceeds with his plan to revive the trials, is ridicule, frustration and injustice.
Last month, evidently scared by the advice of paranoid officials who suggested that, in some cases, trials in federal courts might fail (and ignoring the fact that no US jury would fail to convict a terror suspect against whom the merest shred of genuine evidence could be mustered), Obama announced that he was planning to revive the Commissions.
Critics bayed in disbelief. After all, the much-criticized system, conceived by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006, and then revived by Congress, was, essentially, a shape-shifting legal quagmire, which, over six years, had led to only three convictions (of David Hicks, Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, each of which had its own problems), the resignation of several prosecutors (including one Chief Prosecutor), the sacking of the Pentagon’s legal adviser, and a permanent state of semi-open revolt against the government in the military defense teams.
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