Tuesday, July 04, 2006
What are Military Tribunals?
These are courts set up by order of the President to try suspected terrorists, particularly members of Al Qaeda. The Supreme Court on Friday, June 30, decreed that the President doesn't have authority to set up special courts, especially courts that ignore the requirements of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
For a long time I could not understand why the suspects being kept at Guantanimo couldn't simply be tried by existing military courts martial or by existing federal courts. Administration spokesmen said that a trial in a regular military or civil court would require the government to reveal some of its secret methods of gaining information about the detained suspects. I imagined such things as spies that had infiltrated Al Qaeda whose covers would be blown if the sources of the information were revealed, bugs planted in Osama bin Ladin's cell phone, and so on.
Now it turns out that the "secret" method is well-known and has been publicized. It's torture. A suspect is tortured until he agrees to confess. The proposed tribunal would use the confession to convict him. Revealing that the confession was obtained by torture would enable the defendant to challenge the confession. Without the confession, the government has no case.
I have always known that the Bush administration was staffed by persons of very conservative and backward-looking views and aspirations. I didn't realize until recently that they looked way back as far as the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690's as the "good old days" of criminal justice.
For a long time I could not understand why the suspects being kept at Guantanimo couldn't simply be tried by existing military courts martial or by existing federal courts. Administration spokesmen said that a trial in a regular military or civil court would require the government to reveal some of its secret methods of gaining information about the detained suspects. I imagined such things as spies that had infiltrated Al Qaeda whose covers would be blown if the sources of the information were revealed, bugs planted in Osama bin Ladin's cell phone, and so on.
Now it turns out that the "secret" method is well-known and has been publicized. It's torture. A suspect is tortured until he agrees to confess. The proposed tribunal would use the confession to convict him. Revealing that the confession was obtained by torture would enable the defendant to challenge the confession. Without the confession, the government has no case.
I have always known that the Bush administration was staffed by persons of very conservative and backward-looking views and aspirations. I didn't realize until recently that they looked way back as far as the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690's as the "good old days" of criminal justice.
