"This is not America." That's what a flack for the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions responded when a reporter noted that in our country, reporters are able to watch witnesses and see evidence.
William Glaberson's perspective on the show trial of Salim Hamdan shows us how distorted the American ideal of a nation under laws has become. Guantanamo is a place where there is a judge and a jury, albeit a military jury, yet the judge has ruled that the 5th Amendment does not apply to the defendant. For those of you who don't have a copy of the Constitution handy, the relevant portions of the Amendment read, "No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." "No person"--not just citizens, or residents of the US, but every person in the jurisdiction of the United States. That's what you'd think anyway. But not in this administration's Alice-in-Wonderland view of justice.
In an ironic twist, Glaberson reveals that the government has presented an organizational chart of Osama bin Laden's security detail, of which Hamdan was a low-level figure. The head of the detail, one Abellah Tabarek, was also a prisoner at Guantanamo. He was released in 2004, while his subordinate is on trial.
And in a final irony, if Salim Hamdan should, somehow, obtain an acquittal, the government still maintains its right to hold him at Guantanamo, indefinitely. As an observer of the trial from the ACLU noted, "Where else in the world is someone being prosecuted for a crime who is already serving a life sentence and will continue to serve one if he’s acquitted?"
And we wonder why our opponents prosper.
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2 comments:
Thanks for shining the light of justice on the sham of Bush's sick view of justice.
I'm not clear what message you intended to convey in your final paragraph,"And we wonder why our opponents prosper".
Intuitively I think I get it, based on our shared thoughts about justice and values.
I look to you as an intelligent and thoughtful source of reaction and response to the shit which comes out of the so-called White House, and the clearly compliant media, which is little more than this administration's Pravda.
I hope that you can be more specific and define what you mean by, "our opponents and how they prosper".
This is not a challenge, but a wish for words and phrases which I can use in our mutual wish for voters' rejection of the Bush Administration's attempts to establish its Imperial Presidency during the course of the last eight years.
I was thinking of bin Laden and others who can point to the way we act as justification for their hate.
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