Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President!

4.11.09

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President Obama shakes hands with Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010, on Oct. 28, 2009 (also present: defense secretary Robert Gates and Sen. Carl Levin) (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)I was so delighted that the Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Obama last Wednesday, included a hard-won concession that the administration can transfer prisoners from Guantánamo to the mainland to face trials (even though the legislation still bears the fingerprints of interfering lawmakers, and still, scandalously, prevents any innocent man from being rehoused in the country that falsely imprisoned him) that I overlooked two other distressing facts.

Firstly, the Act authorizes 680 billion dollars to be spent — a mind-boggling amount of money — and secondly, it includes amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, authorizing the revival of the much-maligned “terror trials” that were first dragged from obscurity by Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001.

I have spent much of the last two and a half years railing against the folly and injustice of the Commissions, and, like human rights groups and lawyers, am not remotely assured that the Commissions’ latest incarnation is either prudent or necessary.

Statements derived from torture — key to the initial proposals back in 2001 — are, apparently, long gone, supposedly removed from any dealings with “War on Terror” prisoners in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. When the Commissions were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006 and revived by Congress in the Military Commissions Act just a few months later, all forms of coercion were supposed to have been outlawed, but in reality, the military judges were allowed to use their discretion to decide where a line should be drawn.

In this latest incarnation of the “terror trials”, statements are required to be “voluntary”, bringing the system much more in line with federal court rules, although in reality a loophole still remains. Involuntary statements — in other words, those derived through some form of coercion — will be allowed if “the statement was made incident to lawful conduct during military operations at the point of capture or during closely related active combat engagement, and the interests of justice would best be served by admission of the statement into evidence.”

The new legislation also tightens the rules on the admissibility of hearsay evidence — or, as it should really be called, information obtained through hearsay. Both the prosecution and the defense must now be allowed time to investigate the information, and the military judges are empowered, like the federal court judges ruling on the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, to “take into account all of the circumstances surrounding the taking of the statement, including the degree to which the statement is corroborated, the indicia of reliability within the statement itself, and whether the will of the declarant was overborne.” They are also empowered to decide whether such statements are relevant and probative of the facts, and to reach their own conclusions about whether “the general purposes of the rules of evidence and the interests of justice will best be served by admission of the statement into evidence.”

Protections have also been provided in capital cases, in which the defendants — now, interestingly, identified as “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” rather than the notorious “enemy combatants” of the Bush administration — are entitled to be represented by defense lawyers with experience in handling capital cases.

More troubling are three particular aspects of the new Commissions: the fact that there is no lower age limit on those who can be charged (an omission which may have been included specifically to target Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized in 2002); the fact that, despite proposals made by the administration, the legislation has no “sunset clause,” which means, as Daphne Eviatar explained in the Washington Independent, that, “[al]though Obama has promised to use the commissions sparingly, the new law sets up a parallel justice system that could outlive [his] administration and leave an indelible stamp on its legacy”; and the fact that two dubious war crimes — “conspiracy” and “providing material support for terrorism” — are still included in the legislation.

This is perhaps unsurprising, as it was Congress that introduced “material support for terrorism” in the Military Commissions Act, but its inclusion in the new legislation flies in the face of warnings by senior Obama administration officials that it might not withstand legal challenges. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, Assistant Attorney General David Kris urged lawmakers to drop “material support” from the pending legislation, noting (PDF):

While this is a very important offense in our counterterrorism prosecutions in Federal Court … there are serious questions as to whether material support for terrorism or terrorist groups is a traditional violation of the rules of war … our experts believe that there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.

Kris was more enthusiastic about retaining the other charge used most frequently in the Commissions — “conspiracy,” a legacy of Dick Cheney’s original Commissions — but this, too, is fraught with problems. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case in which the Supreme Court shut down the Commissions’ first incarnation, Justice John Paul Stevens, in an opinion in which he was joined by three other justices, made a point of mentioning that “conspiracy” has not traditionally been considered a war crime, and Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Daphne Eviatar that, as a result, lawyers may well be able to argue that Congress has crafted an unconstitutional ex post facto law, in attempting to justify war crimes charges after the crime in question was committed.

The irony, therefore, is that, although Obama’s Commissions have moved closer to the standards required in federal court trials, the administration has found itself unable to take the logical next step and scrap them completely, pursuing cases in venues with a long history of successfully prosecuting terrorism cases, where well-established rules are already in place to handle “conspiracy” and “material support for terrorism.”

As Lawyers at Human Rights First have been explaining for many years — most recently in an update to their report, “In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Court” — in the last 20 years, federal courts have handled approximately 135 real-life terrorism prosecutions, and have secured convictions in over 90 percent of those cases. When the updated report was issued in July, Elisa Massimino, Human Rights First’s Chief Executive Officer, explained, “Politicians have spent eight years trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to prosecuting terrorism and that approach has failed miserably. This report makes clear that the best way forward is to rely on our existing legal system. Its track record of successfully prosecuting criminals, safeguarding national security, and addressing the complex legal issues of our time is unmatched.”

What is particularly sad about the Obama administration’s decision to cling onto the Commissions is that, elsewhere, senior officials have recognized the power of traditional courts. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo, who spent two years in secret CIA prisons, was actually indicted for his alleged involvement in the 1998 African embassy bombings before the Bush administration began its destructive “War on Terror,” and when he was moved to the US mainland to face a federal court trial in May this year, the Justice Department issued a press release explaining that it has “a long history of … successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal justice system,” and, to prove it, attached a list of successful prosecutions over the last 16 years.

If Ghaliani can be successfully prosecuted in federal court, there is surely no valid reason why a two-tier judicial system is required, especially given the ongoing problems with the Commissions identified above, and I can only conclude that the administration is unwilling to take this route because officials are not satisfied with the federal courts’ 90 percent success rate in terrorist cases, and fear that, in some cases, trials might lead to acquittals.

This is actually how justice works — and how it should work — but as a result of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” it seems that fear has eroded reason to an unprecedented extent, and that acquittals are as unacceptable as the alleged recidivism of even a single prisoner released from Guantánamo.

With this in mind, senior officials would do well to recall that one of the reasons that Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Commissions, resigned in October 2007 was the following exchange with William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s chief counsel, which took place in August 2005.

According to Col. Davis, Haynes “said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time” — a reference to the 1945 trials of Nazi leaders, “considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes,” as an article in the Nation described them. Col. Davis replied that he had noted that there had been some acquittals at Nuremberg, which had “lent great credibility to the proceedings,” and added, “I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process. At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.’”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009),
9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009).


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8 Responses

  1. Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President! by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] Andy Worthington Featured Writer Dandelion Salad http://www.andyworthington.co.uk 4 November […]

  2. Valerie Lucznikowska says...

    That’s my group’s website, not my personal website.

    Have you seen this?
    http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/11/federal-judge-rules-against-military.php

  3. 116 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 171 Still In Limbo « freedetainees.org says...

    […] President Obama first began to waver dreadfully on Guantánamo, and not only proposed reviving the much-criticized Military Commissions as a parallel (or second-tier) judicial system for the prisoners, but also, to what should be his […]

  4. Guantánamo and Yemen: Obama Capitulates to Critics and Suspends Prisoner Transfers by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] is necessary at all, as, for the most part, Obama’s defense of Bush-era policies regarding Military Commissions, indefinite detention, Bagram and “state secrets” — as well as his surge in Afghanistan — […]

  5. Republican Witch-hunters Embrace Dictatorship : STATESMAN SENTINEL says...

    […] Obama made a terrible mistake last May when he accepted calls to revive the military commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, and also signaled his willingness to continue holding other men […]

  6. Arbitrary Government Kidnapping Under the Cloak of ‘Objectivity’ « Little Alex in Wonderland says...

    […] Counsel Greg Craig’s plan to bring some Uighurs to live in the U.S. last spring, his decision to revive the reviled military commissions trial system (which he suspended on his first day in office), and his support of indefinite detention without […]

  7. Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] is not for individuals who will be tried in US criminal courts. It’s for individuals who will be tried in the military commissions.” On Thursday, in a memo from the White House to members of the Illinois congressional […]

  8. Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? | Dandelion Salad says...

    […] Counsel Greg Craig’s plan to bring some Uighurs to live in the US last spring, his decision to revive the reviled military commissions trial system (which he suspended on his first day in office), and his support of indefinite detention without […]

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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