Whistleblower at the Supreme Court
The case is bound to be deeply embarrassing for the Bush administration. In fact, they're scrambling to build a substitute for Guantanamo's "kangaroo courts."
Scott Horton
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001549 writes this morning about a report that an unnamed major, a whistleblower, will tell all in testimony to the Supreme Court in December. He quotes a report in The Independent:
The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as “unconscionable”.
His critique will be the centrepiece of a hearing on 5 December before the US Supreme Court when another attempt is made to shut the prison down. So nervous is the Bush Administration of the latest attack—and another Supreme Court ruling against it—that it is preparing a whole new system of military courts to deal with those still imprisoned. The whistleblower’s testimony is the most serious attack to date on the military panels, which were meant to give a fig- leaf of legitimacy to the interrogation and detention policies at Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.
Horton writes that
an increasing number of military lawyers are expressing deep disgust with the commissions, a system designed by the discredited Alberto Gonzales..........................
“Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should” by a nameless senior officer: If we view international terrorism as a world issue in which we expect the assistance of others, we should resist the easy solution of conducting ad hoc proceedings just because we can . . . we should seek to maximize the appearance of fairness so as to limit avenues for complaint of victor’s justice. The appearance of fairness may best achieved by prosecution of terrorist suspects in United States Federal District Courts.
The members of al-Qaeda may or may not ‘deserve’ trials in a time-tested and jurisprudentially sound forum. However, the world-respected reputation of United States criminal courts has not been built nor maintained for the benefit of any evil person . . . The use of an established court system at this critical time should not be viewed as an action on behalf of accused terrorists, but rather as a representation to needed international partners that the course of our ship of state is steady, and properly charted for the rough waters ahead.
While the author’s name has been redacted,
a careful read suggests very strongly that he is one of the presiding judges at Gitmo. The analysis is dead on, and it clearly reflects the thinking of the officer-lawyers who are being forced to live with and act out the Gitmo charade.http://prairieweather.typepad.com/big_blue_stem/2007/10/whistleblower-a.html
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