Military Tribunals Resume at Guantanamo

[pberq]

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
Military Tribunals Resume at Guantanamo Despite Pending Supreme Court Case on Legality of Hearings

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/05/1351253

<snip>
AMY GOODMAN: Former Attorney General John Ashcroft recently gave a speech to students where he said, ‘This is ridiculous. These people do not deserve the standard judicial treatment to be brought into a court, have their day in court, as prisoners of war weren't in the past given that right.’ What is your response?

BEN WIZNER: Well, I want to say a couple of things in response. The harshest criticism of the military tribunals has come not from human rights organizations and civil libertarians like me. It has come from former members of the prosecution team, whose internal emails that were leaked to the press described the commission system as fixed, as a fraud on the American people, with commission members –

AMY GOODMAN: Prosecution?

BEN WIZNER: Prosecution members, with the commission members hand-picked to ensure conviction, and these comments are described in our friend of the court brief before the Supreme Court. These were internal criticisms. The United States has --

AMY GOODMAN: These were the prosecutors of those at Guantanamo.

BEN WIZNER: They were former members of the prosecution team, would be a better way of describing them. They are no longer prosecutors. They have found people who are more willing to toe the line. This system is being invented from whole cloth. We have a constitutional tradition that is several hundred years old. We have a military justice system that’s half a century old. We have international treaty obligations that set minimum standards for a fair trial. All of those have been thrown out for these commissions, where you have members who are hand-picked by the administration, where you have President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as the final arbiters of guilt and innocence, where you have evidence that may be extracted through coercion and torture that might be used to convict the detainees.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. This is a count of crimes against humanity againt members of the junta

It is a contravention of international law to deny prisoners of war or protected persons justice.

Mr. Ashcroft may not feel these people deserve due process, but that begs the question of any individual's guilt. It is not for Mr. Ashcroft to say, but for a fair impartial court to decide. Perhaps someday, the detaines at Guantánamo will enjoy a fair trial, which is their right as a human being.