It Don’t Gitmo Surreal Than This (Legal Director's Visit To "The Farce")

It Don’t Gitmo Surreal Than This

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be home, but somehow, I doubt that Obama will offer up the degree of surreality we've come to expect and enjoy from Team Bush.

By: GaborRona Monday January 26, 2009 2:14 pm

Gabor Rona is the International Legal Director at Human Rights First. He has made several trips to Guantanamo Bay, most recently to monitor the pretrial hearings in the cases of the alleged 9/11 plot co-conspirators and of Omar Khadr, a 21 year old Canadian accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old. Read more of Gabor’s observations from Guantanamo here.

This last Guantanamo trip, straddling two administrations, was something else, even by the usual "Gitmo is something else" standards.

The Potemkin-justice military commissions were revved up one last time, hours before GWB rode off to Crawford, where he will presumably have more time to perfect his already prodigious brush cutting skills. The Gitmo judges and prosecutors had long ago perfected their skill in making believe that military commissions had nothing to do with politics, so no mention of how it was all likely to come undone before Tuesday's sunset over the Potomac and the Caribbean. The prosecutors had earlier filed a motion to suspend all proceedings in the last days of the Bush administration, but said nothing therein about a new sheriff comin' to town. Motion denied. They re-filed it as soon as Obama took office, but this time, began with reference to "orders" from the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. Presto change-o, motion granted!

Now in a real court, a federal criminal court, this would not happen. Just ask any 8th grader who's heard the 'separation of powers' rap in social studies. Real federal courts are part of the judicial branch, independent of the prosecution that represents the executive branch. Presidents don't tell real judges what to do. The fact that the President can, in effect, tell a military commission judge to close up shop is stark proof that the Guantanamo military commissions are not courts at all. They are political operations, as in show trials, as in farce. Under international law they would also be known as war crimes, as in denying a detainee the right to fair trial, as in the Geneva Conventions. And Obama was right to put an end to it immediately, lest he taint his administration with the misdeeds of his predecessor.

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Here are some other things to make you feel warm and fuzzy about Gitmo:

* Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 architect, complaining to the judge that he was unable to file motions in his case because the guards didn't provide him with sufficient paper, and the judge responding that if he wanted to file a complaint, he should put it in writing.

* DoD Intel Agent 11, who looks too much like Tina Fey looking like Sarah Palin to be taken seriously, testifying in a barely audible voice that child soldier and accused war criminal Omar Khadr was "happy" while undergoing interrogation at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (where he was first detained after having been shot).

* The psychologist who I overheard saying "The detainee wanted to be force-fed." (And she may have been right!)

* The motto "Freedom through Justice," emblazoned on the entrance to the camp that holds the military commission courtrooms, and eerily reminiscent of the cynical but accurate promise that detainees were made at the entrance gate to Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Shall Make You Free).

* Rush Limbaugh, who gave my organization, Human Rights First, the best publicity of the week by calling us "a fringe leftist wacko group" upon hearing my comment to the Associated Press that suspension of the military commissions is "a good first step."

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