Justice is served?
June 30th, 2008
A man has been charged and faces death in the bombing of the USS Cole, which took place in October of 2000. He’s also been charged with various other crimes, including being a member of Al Qeada. In theory, bringing a perpetrator of that act, which killed 17 American servicemen, and a member of a notorious terrorist organization to justice is more than a good thing, it’s well, justice. In practice, however, things tend to get more complicated.
The man is named Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He’s been in US custody for six years. During much of that time, his imprisonment was top secret, known only to the CIA and certain top level federal officials in the Pentagon and above. More recently, he’s been confirmed as one of the men who were tortured (er, aggressively interrogated?) by way of waterboarding between 2002 and 2003. During one of these sessions, he apparently offered a confession to involvement in the destruction of the USS Cole. That confession will now likely be held against him, not in a court of law, but in a secret military tribunal, whose rules are defined by the Executive branch and whose proceedings and evidence will be kept in secret indefinitely. There are claims of other damning evidence potentially existing, but who gets to see it?
It seems Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal adviser to the U.S. military tribunal system, put it best:
We will look at the evidence, all of the evidence that is associated with the case,” Hartmann said. “While there has been an admission that there was waterboarding, there may well be other evidence in the case. That’s not … necessarily the only part of evidence in the case.
If only you or I or even the defendant (can you imagine them handing over classified information to him?) could be included in ‘we.’ I don’t think this is what they meant by ‘Justice is blind.’
So, the question becomes, how can there be justice when due process of law has been tossed aside? How can justice be served if the evidence of that service is only available to a privileged few? At what point does it become symbolic revenge? Wouldn’t a trial cloaked in secrecy and ending in execution only serve to lend fuel to the fire of fundamentalist ‘Islamists?’
Even a verdict of ‘not guilty’ accomplishes nothing because it won’t prove innocence or guilt; it’s an empty declaration. Besides, it seems likely that such a verdict would only lead to a fine-tuning of the tribunal rules, which appear to be wholly experimental and in-flux. And, in what should be significant, these military tribunals don’t meet UN standards for international trials. In fact, Phillip Alston a UN Envoy from the UN’s Human Rights Council, after completing his review of the upcoming tribunals, had this to say:
It would violate international law to execute someone following this kind of proceeding.
What do these and future tribunal trials truly accomplish? Do they make Americans safer when the void in Al Qeada left by hypothetically guilty ‘detainees’ were filled years ago and the years of uncharged incarceration and admitted torture likely multiplied Al Qeada membership? Are they in the service of justice when the UN (whose resolutions were simultaneously used as justification and dismissed as obstacle for war in Iraq) describes them as violations of international law?
Source:
Washington Post
