Maine Owl

The Nation:
Gitmo Trials Rigged

About the time that Congress in its wisdom and with the support of many Democrats, passed the odious Military Commissions Act of 2006, I posted on the nature of the U.S. justice system for Terror War prisoners. Consumers of the teevee science fiction program Star Trek Deep Space Nine will get my reference--it is "Cardassian" justice, in other words no justice at all.

(See below for list of Democratic Senators voting "yea" on final passage, September 28, 2006.)

For the uninitiated, here is a review of what this means:

1. You are denied knowledge of what you are accused of until your trial.
2. You can never know who your accusers are--for "security" reasons
3. Trials are a show for the public, to explain how the guilt was determined, not to find a verdict.
4. The verdict is always predetermined- guilty.
5. The duty of your Consort is get you to valiantly accept the charges and execution.

The follow passage reported today by Ross Tuttle in The Nation and broadcast this morning on Democracy Now! seals forever the shame of the mentality behind Gitmo/Cardassian non-justice:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes--the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders." [emphasis added]

The thing that gives me hope here is that Davis resigned.

Let me recommend my interview with our own Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, during which we really air out and analyze this false statement President Bush explicitly has made: "they will be presumed innocent".

Meanwhile, here is a list of senate Democrats who voted for the MCA in 2006. (Nearly every Republican, save Chafee who's now out also voted for it.) If you have a senator on this list or one that's a Republican, drop 'em a line and remind 'em of what they did and that they may want to try to correct it:

Carper, Johnson, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Menendez, Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Stabenow