Military Commissions, and Omissions

The morning paper brings news that the government’s initial prosecution under the new and improved military commission process for Guantanamo is not going so well. It seems that the first up is a young man who was “captured” –laying on a battlefield, badly wounded—at the age of fifteen, and subsequently charged with tossing a grenade that killed an American soldier. This was in early 2002. the young man has grown up in the Cuban prison camp. He was threatened, implicitly, with gang rape in an American prison if he did not confess (the interrogator has admitted to this in court), so he confessed. But it seems that certain backward parts of the world look down on such practices as torture, or imprisoning children, or waiting eight years and longer to bring an accused to trial.

The Republicans accused the Obama administration, fifteen minutes after Bush left office, with coddling terrorists because, the military commissions Guantanamo inhabitants were being tried and convicted (the latter being considered a natural concomitant to the former, in Republican-speak). So the Attorney General arranged, with the endorsement of the Mayor of New York, to conduct civilian trials in federal court in Manhattan. The Republicans, though, objected to this as being way too dangerous, like the plan, also scuttled for the same reason, to house the remaining Guantanamo “detainees” in a rural prison in Illinois that is otherwise unoccupied. It’s funny how those who are always crowing about how tough we Yanks are, how “these colors don’t run,” etc., find it too dangerous to house fifteen year-old non-English speakers* in maximum security prisons on American soil.  

*Actually, Omar Khadr, the fifteen year-old in question, being a Canadian, probably speaks English at least as well as G. W. Bush.

So, no trials in the tried and true US court system; it’s back to military tribunals. But the tribunals are stalled because of the “danger to lower Manhattan” controversy that basically shut down the entire process, except for the initial five who had been selected for military trials; and as luck would have it, the case that progressed most expeditiously happened to be that of a fifteen year-old who speaks English and so can be quoted in the press as taking offense at being offered a minimal sentence just so he would agree to a plea deal and spare the government the embarrassment of trying him. He argues that he is not guilty –the nerve of this guy!

And, as a sort of final indignity to the entire sad affair, the Obama administration’s pledge of transparency has been rather damaged in the performance by the Pentagon’s decision to bar from the proceedings two reporters. The reporters were eventually allowed back, but according to the Times they “had to acknowledge in writing to the Defense Department that they understood that they had violated military rules by disclosing the identity of an Army interrogator, even though his name was already publicly known.” So there you have it: it is an offense against the Defense Department’s rules “to disclose information that the military deems “protected,” even if that information has already been disclosed” as reported in the Times.

Why is all this important? Because if the Department of Defense can make its own rules, separate and apart from the US Constitution or other laws, it is a short step to go from that to starting wars on flimsy pretexts, conducting secret operations untroubled by Congressional supervision, conducting military operations, abductions and imprisonment without disclosure of the identity of those imprisoned or even the fact that they have been taken into custody, and similar operations in clandestine fashion within the US as well as elsewhere in the world.  Oh, wait.