Trials of Guantanamo suspects begin without a lawyer or reporter in sight

Tomorrow the Bush administration will begin the prosecution of 14 "high-value" terrorism suspects currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. The suspects include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of organising the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The trials will take place with no jury and no press in attendance. The Pentagon are claiming that these so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) are necessary to prevent classified information from becoming public, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they are being held to prevent any of us from hearing what these suspects have to say regarding how they have been treated and where they have been held.

"They're not going to let anybody close," said Clive Stafford Smith, of the UK-based group Reprieve, which represents several dozen Guantanamo prisoners, though none of the 14. "They are trying to stop anyone saying anything about the way they have been abused or which countries they were abused in."

The 14 men - three Pakistanis, two Yemenis, two Saudis, two Malaysians, a Palestinian, a Libyan, a Somali, an Indonesian and a Tanzanian - were transferred to Guantanamo Bay last September from secret US "black site" facilities around the world. At the time of their transfer, Mr Bush claimed: " These are dangerous men, with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans of new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know."

In addition to Mr Mohammed, the prisoners include two other alleged senior al-Qa'ida figures - Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh. Mr Mohammed was described in the official US investigation into the September 11 attacks as their "principal architect" and is also accused of involvement in the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl.

But campaigners insist that without a fair trial and access to lawyers it is impossible to assess what the men may or may not be guilty of. Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents one of the men due to go before a CSRT, Majid Khan, said: "This is a system designed to obtain a pre-determined result."

Mr Dixon said that Mr Bush had admitted the 14 men had been subjected to " enhanced interrogation" techniques which he said was a euphemism for torture. He added that under the CSRT rules the government could use information obtained under torture. He added: "You don't know what is true until you have given them a fair trial."

So, in George Bush's America, it is now acceptable to try people without a jury - using evidence that you have obtained by torturing them - whilst allowing no witnesses to verify the fairness of the process.

The Pentagon have promised to release transcripts of the hearings although they admit that they will be edited to remove information it deemed "dangerous to national security".

This is the shocking result of Senator McCain's supposedly brave stance against the Bush administration's torture policy. Many of us argued at the time that McCain and others were merely providing a fig leaf of respectability for a disgraceful policy, that they were allowing the use of torture as long as it was never called by it's actual name.

The Bill that was passed, despite the high blown claims of McCain and his followers that they had achieved a "compromise", actually legalised torture and indefinite detention.

We are now witnessing the outcome of that "compromise". No jury. No press. Information obtained by torture deemed admissible.

It's hard to watch what this administration is engaging in and believe that these events are being played out in the United States of America rather than in some tinpot dictatorship.

I honestly believe that there will come a day when these same US Senators who support this kind of behaviour will have to account for the barbarity of what they have condoned. On that day, they will not be unlike many Germans after World War II who stumbled around claiming that they did not know what was being done in their names.

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Tags: Guantanamo Bay, CSRT, Combatant Status Review tribunerals, Bush, McCain, trials, Supreme Court