Color Me "Hugely Disappointed"

From today's NY Times:

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

I believe that this is a major mistake. The GTMO military tribunal system is fatally flawed by the blatant attempts to rig the outcomes, attempts that were transparently obvious as soon as the first Executive Order establishing the system was issued more than seven years ago. They were set up to be a cross between kangaroo courts and Star Chamber courts, with no protection against abuses by the government. Permitting the use of confessions extracted by torture, let alone the admission of third-hand rumors as fact, is against everything that a so-called justice system stands for.

As originally envisioned the tribunals were to be a "law free zone", nothing more than a fig leaf before a long series of summary executions. That they did not turn out that way is in very large measure to the credit of the military attorneys assigned to act as defense counsels, for they took their jobs seriously and refused to be the handmaidens of the executioners.

The GTMO tribunals are fatally flawed. They are a huge stain on the concept that we are a nation of laws. They should be eliminated. And if that puts this country in between a rock and a hard place as far as what to do with the detainees, well, it is a place into which that nobody forced us to go.