Justice

The other day I was watch the Lehrer Newshour, a show that usually does a pretty good job. However, Lehrer had a wet-kiss piece on the Gitmo trials. They interviewed some Pentagon mouthpiece (without any opposition) who gave out the company lines that the Gitmo prisoners would get fair military trials, just like the boys in uniform do.

Well, someone seems to disagree:

Top Gitmo lawyer: ‘We can’t have acquittals.’

Col. Morris Davis resigned his position as chief prosecutor for Guantánamo Bay’s military commissions after being placed under the command of torture advocate William J. Haynes. As a result of a conversation he had with Haynes in 2005, Davis tells The Nation that he doesn’t believe “the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial“:

“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.’”

Anyone who thinks these will be fair trials needs their heads examined. Let's put it another way, if these trials are so fair with the military bending over backwards to offer justice, why not have the defendents tried in American civil court with civilian rules of justice?