Obama's kangaroo courts
AS SOON as President Bush decided to use waterboarding and other extreme measures in prisoner interrogations, he made it far more difficult to bring terrorism detainees to justice, since courts disallow evidence based on coercion. Bush's solution was the anything-goes, kangaroo-court military tribunals that Barack Obama rightly and repeatedly criticized during the campaign. Now President Obama has made the mistake of resorting to tribunals himself.
Granted, Obama says he will use the tribunals sparingly, and military prosecutors will not be able to introduce statements made by detainees after torture, which Bush would have allowed. Also, Obama will limit the use of hearsay evidence and give defendants greater freedom in choosing their counsel. But these concessions to due process raise an obvious question: Why not try the defendants in federal criminal courts, or in the military court-martial system?
Federal prosecutors have tried and convicted dozens of terrorism suspects in criminal courts, including those involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, now serving a life sentence. Prosecuting Guantanamo detainees in courts would not be easy, but investigators have had ample time in the years since the detainees were captured to compile evidence not tainted by harsh interrogations or hearsay statements. The government could use such clean evidence to successfully pursue charges of material support of terrorism and conspiracy if it proves impossible to try the detainees on the most serious offenses.
Whatever steps the Obama administration takes to make its military tribunals less of a farce than the Bush version, any detainee convicted is still likely to appeal the verdict in federal court. Obama's lawyers would then face the same thankless task Bush's lawyers faced: trying to persuade federal judges that the tribunals' shortcuts to convictions pass muster with the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.
Obama tried to make a clean break with the Bush administration's mishandling of detainees with his pledge to close the Guantanamo prison center. That feat means less, however, if he persists with tribunals that helped give Guantanamo its bad name.
In his inaugural address, Obama praised the founding fathers for drafting "a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake." But expedience and politics - a desire to head off criticisms from Republicans like Dick Cheney that Obama is soft on terrorism - are the only explanations for choosing the drumhead justice of the tribunals. 