US President Barack Obama has done a U-turn on military trials for detainees at Guantanamo Bay. During his campaign last year he had attacked the system and one of his first acts as president was to put a halt to it and order a review. He has now decided that, while some detainees will be freed and others tried in civil court, he will, after all, continue with the military tribunals devised by the Bush administration for those inmates whose conviction in a civil court cannot be assured.
This is a deeply disappointing decision. Obama said that he could do things differently. His “improvements”, such giving defendants a little more freedom in choosing their lawyers and restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and evidence obtained by cruel treatment, do little to make the tribunals more acceptable. They are designed to convict, not to administer justice. The decision will do nothing to remove the stain from America’s character that Obama wants eliminated. It will disappoint the many Americans who have felt ashamed at the gross illegality of the whole Guantanamo process — detention center and military tribunals together — and who rightly understand that its draconian regime and contempt for the principle of justice on which the US was founded has made them less, not more, safe. Ever since the first detainees arrived, the camp has played straight into the hands of militants. It gives credibility to their accusations that American politics is run on hypocrisy. It aids their cause. They will use the decision to say that it shows that Obama’s promise of change was a lie and that he is no different to other American presidents before him. And there will be takers for it.
Nor is this his first U-turn. He promised to withdraw American troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. That promise too has been watered down. Instead of May 2010, it is now August 2010, and there are suspicions that, come that date, the US will discover some reasons why troops, renamed as training forces, have to remain.
Obama’s problem is the reality of power. It is easy to criticize and to make promises when in opposition. There is also the problem of the American delivery of justice which is based on an adversarial court system where a jury decides and a judge oversees the attempts by opposing lawyers to convince its members. It would not be a problem in France, for example, where major crimes, including terrorism, are tried in special assize courts with seven judges and no jury. If the detainees at Guantanamo had been captured by French forces, they would have all been tried by now and either freed or jailed. But Obama is not about to change the American judicial system. That would be too massive a job, even for him — and it would take years.
Barbarous acts of Myanmar junta
The Times of London yesterday commended on Myanmar junta’s threat to jail Aung San Suu Kyi, saying in part:
Stalin is the model. Myanmar’s generals are following the Soviet dictator’s sadistic approach to justice: Rearresting political prisoners just as their term comes to an end, introducing spurious new charges and sentencing them to a further long term in prison or a labor camp. Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has spent 13 of the past 19 years under close house arrest, was due, under Myanmar law, to be released in two weeks’ time. Yesterday, however, she was taken from the house where she has been isolated for the past five years to a notoriously harsh prison, accused of breaking the terms of her house arrest and threatened with a further five years in jail. It is the despicable, cowardly act of a junta that fears the moral authority of a Nobel Peace Prizewinner and is determined to break her spirit as well as her health.
The pretext is absurd. Suu Kyi is accused of allowing a 53-year-old American psychology student to pay her an unauthorized visit and stay two days in her compound. John Yettaw swam across a lake to reach her, apparently unnoticed by the guards and unhindered by the security presence around Suu Kyi’s house. His motives remain unclear, although he made a similar attempt last year. Whatever the explanation, the generals have found in this modern Leander a pretext to keep the leader of the National League for Democracy in prison until after next year’s promised multiparty elections — a clear indication that, even now, the junta is planning how to rig the vote to remain in power.
Suu Kyi is a woman of great courage. Time and again she has stood up, frail and isolated, against the junta’s attempts to silence, bribe or exile her. She refused the one-way ticket out of Myanmar to visit her British husband when he was dying of cancer in 1999. She has never compromised on the principle of a free vote, despite attempts to enlist her in a sham deal that could be presented to her supporters as a political concession. Even while held incommunicado, she has exuded the powerful moral authority that inspired many Myanmars to support the doomed attempt by Buddhist monks to demand basic freedoms and human rights in 2007.
