The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson describes the mess that is the pretrial hearings at Guantanamo:
The case of the mystery button began like a story about a poltergeist. On Monday, a preliminary hearing in the military commission trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other accused 9/11 conspirators convened at Guantánamo. The courtroom is set up so that spectators behind sound-proof glass can listen to an audio feed with a forty-second delay. As Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Heralddescribes it, “A red emergency light spins in court when a censor at the judge’s elbow hits the mute button to prevent someone from spilling national security secrets.” At just before 2:30 P.M., David Nevin, one of the defense lawyers, who was addressing a brief having to do with C.I.A. secret prisons, said he understood that “we are going to do this in a 505 and that some portion of this will turn out to be closed or secret.” As he pronounced “secret,” the light began to flash and white noise filled the audio feed, as if it had been a trigger word—even though neither the security officer or the judge had touched the button. That’s when the judge, James Pohl, realized that he was not, as he’d thought—given the trappings and the job title—running his own courtroom. Some unknown person in another room was, and was apparently able to turn the audio off or on, or, for all anyone knew, pipe in the soundtrack to “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Judge Pohl, who is also an Army colonel, was confused and angry.
“If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation because I—there is no classification on it, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off,” the judge said.
Read it all. It brings embarrassment and shame to our country.
Unfortunately this incident gets more attention than the underlying issue that the United States tortured prisoners and now wants to put them on trial for their lives while keeping the torture secret, including the torture of anyone whose testimony is offered to support their conviction and execution.
If KSM had been put on trial in S.D.N.Y. from the start, he’d be long dead.
The article goes on to point out one way that decision has caught the prosecutors in a trap. In a trial in our regularly constituted courts, the prosecutors could have indicted these guys for conspiracy. That’s not an available option under international law as being applied in the Guantanamo courts. WIth an appeals court ruling against them, the prosecution wants to drop the conspiracy charge and the Pentagon doesn’t.
As I said, the whole article is worth reading for the way it highlights several aspects of the bogus nature of those courts.
One thing stands out to me and that is the CIA wanted KSM’s intell a lot more than they wanted him to have any kind of fair trial. We need to have a “Dreyfus” movement in the USA to put a stop to this kind of thing in the future. But if we are willing to put up with drome program I doubt any one will worry about a fair trial for KSM.
Anderson: If that’s a motion, I second it.
I am not trying to hi-jack this thread, but there is no open thread and this fascinates me, and it is slightly relevant to the subject of trials in a military context.
Today there was interesting news that prosecutors in Germany have located some men who were SS troops (who were 18-19 at the time) who participated in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. See: Germany inquiry into Oradour wartime massacre in France: http://www.bbc.co.uk…europe-21261775
The definitive television documentary about World War Two is the 26-episode British production titled The World at War (http://www.imdb.com/…ref_=fn_al_tt_2), which aired in 1973. I first saw the series when I was in college, and then a couple of years ago I purchased a box set of the series on DVD. The boxed set includes the entire 22.5 hours that was televised, and an additional 30 hours of material that was not televised (such as interviews with Germans who hid Jews, and interviews with Hitler’s valet and secretary).
The series was narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The very first episode begins by showing some ruins and Olivier narrating: “Down this road, on a summer day in 1994, the soldiers came …” See this clip: http://www.youtube.c…h?v=B5wXx5zn4P8
The road mentioned, and the ruins shown, are of the small French town, Oradour-sur-Glane. In June 1944, German SS troops massacred the men, women, and children in the town. Then the SS burned the town. The ruins of the town were not disturbed, but remain today as a memorial. If you go to Google maps and look at the satellite photo of Oradour-sur-Glane, you can see the ruins. A new town has been built next to the ruins. The new town is just to the north west of the ruins. See: http://en.wikipedia….adour-sur-Glane
Here’s another interesting film clip about Oradour-sur-Glane: http://www.youtube.c…h?v=BZ-C6eZ0OFk.
Observer: I’m with you all the way on the quality of The World at War series. Top shelf, all the way.
Look … it may just be me … it may be my MacBookPro … it may be my Google connection … but none of the links in your Jan. 30 post work.
“the 26-episode British production titled The World at War”
I’ll put that on my list of DVDs for when I’m in the nursing home. Tho presumably, by then, they’ll be able just to play the same DVD over and over again, and I’ll be cool with that.