Tim Worstall

Those Military Tribunals

Hmm, I’m not sure this is quite right:

All charges against the two detainees in Monday’s hearings, Omar Khadr,
and Yasser Ahmed Hamdan, the man accused of being Osama bin Laden’s
driver, were dismissed, throwing the legal system at Guantánamo into
chaos.

The legal system at Guantanamo has always been chaos. There is no "throwing" about it. I have to admit that I regard the whole thing as one of the more mystifying issues of the past few years. Why was there this attempt to create an entirely new legal jurisdiction?

In

6 responses

  1. AntiCitizenOne Avatar
    AntiCitizenOne

    > Why was there this attempt to create an entirely new legal jurisdiction?
    Create a delay, then send them back to Afghanistan to be tried shot.
    They should be treated as the Geneva convention demands (wall + jihadi + firing squad).

    Reply
  2. Marcin Tustin Avatar
    Marcin Tustin

    Why? In the hope that their new legal system would not protect those brought before it. What they failed to understand was that judges don’t change when they sit in a different courtroom – there’s no incentive to dispense bad justice, and the strong incentive of conscience and professionalism not to.

    Reply
  3. Baby-eating Liberal Avatar
    Baby-eating Liberal

    Tim, the answer to your question regarding the ‘why’ can be seen in the administration’s belief that rule of law does not apply to those in power in the 50-100 year timeframe of the War on Terror.
    The Geneva Conventions on detainee treatment are ‘quaint’, FISA is too restrictive since it requires some form of oversight/review, Gitmo needs doubled in size – this is the new era of Dirty Harry, in which bad men in black hats can’t be dealt with inside of the law.
    I’m feeling you on this one, AntiCitzenOne – this is an administration that would really love to get things over with and just shoot them. Simple, right? Clean, pure, and certainly devoid of the hypocrisy of the current shadow system, where even if guilt is established, it is established in secret. Are they guilty? Are they innocent? Were their thumbs broken to get them to sign a confession? Were they feted with sirloin and yoga exercise, instead? The lack of any sense of transparency in the process puts the whole thing in question, even if behind closed doors the situation is on the up and up, we don’t _know_ that.
    Combine the questionable results with unknown methods, and add in the fact that the new legal jurisdiction is nowehere near as efficient in obtaining convictions as the criminal justice system (Tribunals: 1 guy, David Hicks; Actual Justice: Shoe Bomber, Life; Moussaoui, Life; Lackawanna Six, 7-10; Ahmed Ali, 30; Mohammeds al-Moayad and Zayed [75 and 45]; etc.) and the only conclusion I can draw is that GWB wanted a system where, as AntiCitizenOne pointed out, we could just shoot them and be done with it, but in doing so accidentally coupled that setup to something that tried to resemble an American military court.
    If, perhaps, he had tried to couple bullet-to-the-head justice with a Chinese military court, or a Soviet military court, there might have been more satisfying results and body counts.

    Reply
  4. Andrew Paterson Avatar
    Andrew Paterson

    Surely before Guantanamo (an intelligence gathering operation first and foremost), those within its walls who carried out perfidy (including Omar Khadr IIRC), fought without a uniform/recognisable symbol etc would have simply been shot upon capture on the hills of Afghanistan.

    Reply
  5. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    I’ve long argued that Gitmo should be used as a triage mechanism. Separate the stream of detainees into three groups: those with low intelligence value who are unlikely to be a future threat, those with low intelligence value who are likely to be a future threat, and high intelligence value targets. Group one you release (after fingerprinting them etc.) Group two you speedily execute. Group three you sweat until all useful intelligence has been extracted, then you execute them.

    Reply
  6. Baby-Eating Liberal Avatar
    Baby-Eating Liberal

    See, Mr. Gillies understands: implement the Soviet/Chinese Communist system of detention and interrogation and conservatives get exactly what they think they want. Just don’t be hypocritical about it – simply admit that you’re implementing the same system that has well served autocratic regimes throughout time.

    Reply

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