Feb 12th 2008 | From Economist.com
A decision to try six Guantánamo inmates
THE charges are long overdue. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been in American custody since his capture in 2003. He has described himself during a military hearing as an al-Qaeda leader and friend of Osama bin Laden. He said he is responsible for a long (and somewhat baffling) list of terrorist attacks. At a hearing last year in Guantánamo Bay to assess whether he should be considered as an “enemy combatant” Mr Mohammed boasted, among other things, of planning the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in 2001. But only now has the Pentagon charged Mr Mohammed, and five others, with murder and war crimes, for those attacks. Military prosecutors will seek the death penalty as punishment.
Despite his admissions the prosecution will be far from an open-and-shut case. Instead the planned trial will provoke many months of controversy, amid accusations of ill-treatment of inmates and the use of threats and torture—such as waterboarding, a technique that induces a feeling of drowning—to obtain confessions. Renewed demands for the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay are also expected: the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for the presidency say that they want to see the detention facility shut down.
The sorry mess of a legal system created by George Bush to deal with suspected terrorists has lurched from one failure to the next. Last June, military judges dismissed war-crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates (a Canadian and a Yemen-born man). They decided that special military commissions could only try “unlawful” enemy combatants, whereas the accused were categorised merely as enemy fighters. Of the 778 prisoners kept in Guantánamo, fewer than 300 now remain: most of the rest have been repatriated, after long detention, without facing charges. In the six years since the creation of the military commissions only one man, David Hicks, an Australian, has been convicted, and ...
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