Bush faces Republican revolt over terror trials

As I reported the other day, Bush was hoping to use his proposed prosecution of senior al Qaeda figures as a tool for forcing the Democrats on to the back foot before the mid term elections by labelling them as "soft on terrorism" if they did not vote in Congress to allow him to have the military tribunals that he seeks as a way of getting round his defeat in the Supreme Court.

It was a particularly nasty little plan and a blatant way of using terrorism, and fears of it, as a political tool rather than a way of genuinely making America more safe.

I am pleased to report that it's a plan that appears to be blowing up in his face with several Republicans refusing to go along with it.

"It would be unacceptable legally in my opinion to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never had heard the evidence against them," Lindsey Graham, a former military judge and a Republican senator from South Carolina who is a member of the armed services committee, told the New York Times yesterday. "Trust us, you're guilty, we're going to execute you, but we can't tell you why'? That's not going to pass muster."

Military law experts have also lined up against the proposal. "I am not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognised by civilised people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," Brigadier General James Walker, the staff judge advocate to the marine corps commandant, told the armed services committee.

Mr Graham and other high-profile Republicans such as Senator John McCain of Arizona have produced their own draft legislation on military tribunals which would guarantee suspects the right to see all evidence against them, and bar evidence obtained through torture.

Under the White House plan the fate of Guantánamo defendants would be decided by a jury of five military officers - 12 if the charges carry the death penalty. As well as the use of classified evidence off limits to the defendant, the prosecution could use hearsay and evidence obtained through coercion. "It would be up to the judge to determine, based on an argument by the accused, whether he believed something was torture and needed to be prohibited," John Bellinger, the state department legal adviser, said.

I am very suspicious of any government or police force who say they have evidence of a person's guilt but, unfortunately, they are not able to show it to us for security reasons.

Blair often implied before the Iraq war that there was evidence he had that would have changed the minds of those of us who objected to the war, if only he were allowed to show it to us. It turned out to be bunkum. There was no such evidence.

Likewise, many Americans will be unaware of the British case of Colin Stagg, a young man accused of a brutal murder on Wimbledon Common. Even when the case against him collapsed the police let it be known they were seeking no other suspect, in effect giving a nod and a wink to all of us that he had done it and that the police had evidence that they could not make public. I well remember conversations around dinner tables at the time with people assuring me, "They know he did it".

It took almost a decade for this perceived "knowledge" to be revealed as nonsense and Stagg as no more than a sacrificial lamb the police had, unwittingly, offered as a way of relieving the relentless pressure of the tabloids. It is worth remembering that, even after the case against Stagg collapsed, senior police officers were still reassuring reporters of his guilt:

The senior officer looked at us as if we were fools. He could assure us that Stagg was as guilty as Crippen. He was so self-confident that we might have believed him if we had not read up on the case. Other editors were less sceptical and the anonymous mutterings convinced them that a liberal judge had let a terrible killer walk free on a technicality. I talked to some of them recently and they seemed to be genuinely shocked that DNA evidence now shows that Rachel Nickell's killer may be a man held in Broadmoor. Shocked and a little ashamed, because what all those off-the-record briefings produced was a police-approved Stagg hunt led by a pack of C-list celebs and thoughtless hacks.

And now we have the neo-cons assuring us that the men currently held at Guantanamo are guilty, yet insisting that a military tribunal is the only fitting way to try them.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe if they had evidence then they would show it. Accept no excuses for why evidence cannot be presented, as all historical precedents in this matter tend to show that, when such claims are made, they are usually indicative of an absence of evidence rather than of the evidence's sensitive nature.

I know many on the right have given Bush an incredible amount of wriggle room when it comes to dealing with al Qaeda, but sending people to their deaths without ever telling them why they are being executed, even when the people involved are accused of such loathsome crimes as those committed by al Qaeda, should be a line that even the most partisan Bush supporter is unwilling to cross.

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Tags: Bush, neo-cons, Guantanamo, war on terror, military, tribunerals