White House claims that the military trials of the six Guantanamo detainees alleged to be behind the 9/11 will be "fair" and that justice will be done are specious nonsense. This is a flawed trial in a flawed detention process driven by a deeply flawed US administration that persists in folly, even when it is against its own best interests.
These men should be brought to trial within the US mainland judicial process, not in some hole-in-the-corner military tribunal at an offshore base. They should have always enjoyed the rights of all accused, protected from torture and if they were indeed found guilty of the monstrous crimes of which they are accused, duly punished. Instead, they have been detained for up to six years in degrading conditions and some, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have allegedly confessed after being exposed to torture, including the loathsome and illegal technique known as "waterboarding".
Most people, probably including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized this torture, would confess to anything their torturers wanted to hear in order to save their lives and escape further horrific treatment. Thus these "confessions" will prove worthless. Worse, defendants who may not in fact have been tortured will be able to claim convincingly that any admissions they made under ordinary interrogation were equally false.
The reason the Bush administration threw away the rulebook is clear. They wanted to extract as much information as quickly as possible from these suspects, so that they could close in on the rest of Bin Laden's organization. But in doing this, they made any future prosecution of these individuals in a normal court of law entirely unsafe. Thus the deplorable need to keep the process within the military.
But even this is a doomed ambition. In part because it has been made clear that the military prosecutor will be seeking death penalties, it is inevitable that these cases will in time escape the military and almost certainly find their way to US Supreme Court. Along the way, lawyers and legislators will attack the way in which these men have been held and treated. Although it may seem unthinkable to many, there is, therefore, a chance that the cases against the accused will actually collapse because of the widespread perversion of their legal and human rights.
If that happened, guilty men might actually walk free and there would be no conviction and no punishment for the world's greatest single act of terrorism. The detention of Al-Qaeda suspects in Guantanamo Bay was an ill-conceived ploy to keep alleged terrorists away from the proper judicial process. The Bush White House was warned repeatedly by friends and allies that this process was not the solution, that it was illegal and that it would create more problems than it solved. Guantanamo attacked the very principles of justice and fairness on which the US was built and would, therefore, ultimately fail. And so it is proving.
