Obama administration lifts freeze on military tribunals for Guantanamo inmates; civilian courts might find people not guilty

So the Obama Administration lifted its freeze on military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay Monday. We commented on the issue of civilian trials versus military tribunals a few blogs back when two former justice dept. appointees expressed their opposition to civilian trials in the Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration will also be laying out its plan for those detainees to be kept indefinitely because they are too dangerous to release but cannot be tried. We are faced day in day out with the propaganda that we live in a democratic society, a society with a government of the people by the people and all that. We have a justice system also that is fair so they say. Of course, we know that’s not the case as the prisons are full of poor and working class people, almost 50% of them African Americans which says a lot about US society.

But what brings me to write about this issue again is the real views the ruling class has about society and how openly their real take on life is revealed in the pages of their more serious journals---the papers that are for their consumption and not propaganda for us.

The 48 remaining detainees that the administration says have to be detained indefinitely, “cannot be put on trial because, among other reasons, evidence might be tainted by their treatment during questioning…” writes the Wall Street Journal. In other words, the evidence that the prosecution is using to keep these people in prison for the rest of their lives could be “tainted” as it was obtained through torture, like waterboarding for example. And if this is the case, such evidence “might be deemed by judges to have been coerced.” In other words, with a civilian trial by jury, our wonderful democratic justice system might find the defendant not guilty if all the real evidence is taken in to consideration; someone might cop to anything if they think they alternative is drowning.

As biased as a justice system is in a bourgeois democratic society, it is a hell of a lot fairer than a military court. And as we wrote in the earlier blog, this was the danger when the suspect in the Kenyan and Tanzanian US embassy bombings was tried in a New York court last November, he came close to being found not guilty as the jury rejected more than 200 counts against him. He was found guilty on one count and sentenced to life in prison, but this was a bit nerve wracking for the military tops as their reputation was at stake. They need reliable courts that will confirm their claims, not stupid civilians that might be swayed by evidence.

“Terrorists fight out of uniform and target civilians and thus do not deserve traditional prisoner of war protections” writes the WSJ in it’s editorial on March 8th. Apart from the fact that this comes from a paper that champions a military intervention that just slaughtered a bunch of nine year olds out looking for firewood in Afghanistan because they thought they were “insurgents”, and frequently bombs civilian events like weddings, it also means the Libyan opposition are terrorists as they have no uniforms. More importantly, those fighters in the US revolutionary war never wore uniforms either so they must have been terrorists.

The point is that we have no idea who is in Guantanamo and what they are really guilty of. The more the US public knows, the more information that is made available to us, the better off we are. And civilian trials are a step closer to that than closed military courts where decisions are made by generals and not members of the public.