As this Peter Finn piece in the Washington Post makes clear, the state of evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees is so sad that it is beyond pathetic. We probably can’t convict more than a handful of them, and most of them probably don’t even deserve to be prosecuted. The Pentagon says that 61 separate released detainees have returned to active jihadist activities. I think they’re totally full of shit, but think about what it would mean if it were true!
We are going to have to release almost everyone at Guantanamo because we can’t successfully prosecute them. But many of them could have and should have been prosecuted. A few of them are seriously dangerous criminals, and some of them were directly involved in the 9/11 plot. Some people on the right will kick and scream about releasing even the innocent, let alone the guilty. But what are we supposed to do?
The people to be angry with are the Republicans that created this situation. Imagine if I told you on 9/11 that the people that did it would be released because the government screwed up their cases! What if I told you that the government wouldn’t even be able to maintain coherent case files or keep track of physical evidence!
I mean, look at this:
Military defense lawyers also said yesterday that the Office of Military Commissions may have accidentally withdrawn the charges against all defendants at Guantanamo Bay facing trial, including Jawad and even Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Defense lawyers said the Office of Military Commissions, while creating new jury panels, took the additional step of re-referring all charges, which, they said, would return all cases to square one and require new arraignments.
“This was a royal screw-up,” said Air Force Reserve Maj. David Frakt, Jawad’s military attorney. Another military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, expressing disbelief at the action, said, “This is military justice 101.”
A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has asked lawyers in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, who is about to go on trial, to brief him on the matter.
“If, in fact, the charges referred on 24 April 2007 have been withdrawn and re-referred on 17 December 2008, it appears the first order of business at the Commission session scheduled for 19 January 2009 is to arraign Mr Khadr on the newly referred charges,” Judge Patrick J. Parrish wrote in an e-mail to counsel.
Pentagon officials called the legal move “simply an administrative action to update commission panels.”
“In some cases, the defense is challenging the way the substitutions were made,” according to a statement by the Office of Military Commissions. “The military judges have ordered briefs on this issue. Depending upon how the judges rule, the government will be prepared to respond.”
Hurricane Katrina was patty-cake compared to this. George W. Bush kept us safe from terrorists? The way things stand right now, we’re going to have to allow tainted evidence in order to avoid setting the 9/11 plotters free.
