At Gitmo, No Room for Justice

There's an article by Scott Horton over at Harper's magazine which deserves to be read widely.

It details the worrying level of interference the Bush administration are having into the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay and how this interference is for purely political gain and has left many prosecutors, defense counsels, military judges and staffers feeling that, "the military commissions, which could have been used to showcase American values, have instead become a sort of laughing stock for the world, an embarrassment for the uniformed services."

Politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections, the former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay said last night, adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month.

Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the “strategic political value” of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed “sexy” over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.

So these same Republicans, who use national security as a main reason for people to elect them, are choosing the kind of prisoners being put before military commissions on the basis of political gain. Rather than proceeding with cases which have a strong evidential basis they would prefer to proceed with cases which will be "sexy". In other words, with cases that might frighten the American public into re-electing the Republican Party in 2008.

This is the antithesis of a party which genuinely cares about national security and justice for the people they have in their custody.

While Col. Davis cites political appointees in the Pentagon, a number of his colleagues focus their criticisms on the Department of Justice. They say that political appointees at Justice have been responsible for most of the egregious decisions which have embarrassed the military in the past. “The problem is pretty simple. These people have no interest whatsoever in justice. It’s politics 24/7. It will serve them through a couple of press cycles, but in the end it will embarrass the military and the United States bigtime.”

The amount of political interference into this military system of justice is best illustrated with the blatant intervention of Dick Cheney into the case of David Hicks, the Australian who was the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be convicted under the U.S. Military Commissions Act of 2006.

“One of our staffers was present when Vice President Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal. He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with [Australian Prime Minister] Howard. I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America. And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade. It’s demoralizing for all of us.”

For what were the conditions of this plea bargain which Cheney struck?

A stipulation of the plea bargain ensured that the 5 years that Hicks remained at Guantanamo Bay would not be subtracted from any sentence handed down by the military tribunal. Further conditions are that Hicks should not speak to the media for one year, Hicks is to not take legal action against the United States and that Hicks is to withdraw allegations that the US military abused him.

This is, indeed, the politicisation of the process of justice. By asking a prisoner to withdraw allegations that he has been abused as part of a plea bargain puts Cheney in the same ballpark as someone like Mugabe. Allegations of abuse should be vigorously investigated, their denial should never be made part of any plea bargain.

But that Cheney proceeded in this manner shows how the prosecutors, defense counsels, military judges and staffers who worry that American justice is being besmirched by such actions are right to have such apprehensions.

After WWII the United States insisted that the Nazis were not simply hung and that justice must be seen to be done. To this end they constituted the Nuremberg trials. This won the US the admiration of the world.

And yet here is Cheney, coming to the kind of shitty plea bargain that would not have looked out of place in Pretoria at the height of Apartheid.

This is not America as I understand it.

Click title for full article.

Tags: military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, high-profile detainees, U.S. Military Commissions Act of 2006, Cheney, Howard, Guantanamo Bay, David Hicks