9/11 Military Commission: More Tragedy Than Farce

[unhappycamper]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daphne-eviatar/911-military-commission-m_b_2602312.html

9/11 Military Commission: More Tragedy Than Farce
Daphne Eviatar
Posted: 02/01/2013 6:11 pm

It would almost be funny if it weren't so sad. Four days of military commission hearings at Guantanamo Bay this past week yielded little more than confusion about the law and heightened suspicion of the U.S. government. Any steps toward bringing to justice the five co-defendants accused of the murder of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, were barely perceptible.

To an ordinary observer, the most memorable parts of the pre-trial hearing in the 9/11 case were when the audio feed turned to static and the video screen went black while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's defense lawyer addressed the court. The sudden censorship was a complete surprise to the judge, Col. James Pohl, who admitted he had no idea who was in charge of the censor button.

~snip~

But all along, both observers and participants in the trial had thought it was the judge or his court security officer who was deciding when to black out the proceedings. Suddenly, everyone learned that wasn't so. Including the judge. He wasn't happy about it.

"If some external body is turning the commission off based on their own views of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation," he said afterwards, "then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off."