.....justice is meant to serve the party."February 20, 2008
Gitmo Trials Rigged
Ross Tuttle
...........
As the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds,
a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions,
the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal. ...........................
Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions' bias--
a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration's conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else. When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes--the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "(Haynes) said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response,
Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings. "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," Davis continued. "At which point, (Haynes's) 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.'" .........................
more at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/tuttle