The Little Brown Reader

Bush Picks Six to Face Military Tribunal

I don't know what bothers me the most about military tribunals -- if it's that they don't comply with the Bill of Rights, or that the U.S. regularly criticizes countries that do this sort of thing, or that it seems to indicate that our normal criminal justice system is not competent to administer justice, or that it makes the U.S.'s efforts to establish immunity from the International Criminal Court, and its recriminations over Belgium's war crimes charges against U.S. officials, look so hypocritical that it hurts, or that we are holding these people and probably the tribunals in CUBA (?!?!), or that we are appointing U.S. military lawyers to defend supposed "enemy combatants"...

Maybe it's all those things. They all bother me the most.

Just kidding. It's the Bill of Rights thing, hands down...but the whole package stinks. Bad.

Bush Picks Six to Face Military Tribunal

Excerpts:

``The State Department issues a report every year in which it criticizes those nations that conduct trials before secret military tribunals. What I'm hearing sounds alarmingly like something similar,'' said Neal Sonnett, also a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The Pentagon officials also raised the possibility that the military might continue to hold the suspects even if they are acquitted by a tribunal. The prisoners' status as ``unlawful combatants'' in the war against terrorism is separate from their guilt or innocence on charges brought before a tribunal, a military official involved in the tribunal process said.

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