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If, in 2009, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused in the 9/11 attacks had been tried in civilian criminal courts, especially the New York federal courts with their great experience in prosecuting terrorism cases, the sheikh and his co-defendants by now would have their verdicts, be deep into the appeals process and close to facing whatever fate the judiciary had in store for them.
The prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a continuing embarrassment and rebuke to our preaching about due process and the rule of law, would likely be closed, as President Barack Obama pledged to do early in his first term, and no longer a rallying cry for jihadi zealots.
Instead, the five defendants are still at the U.S. naval base and still awaiting trial by an untested military tribunal cobbled together for the occasion and still no nearer a resolution of the cases against them than they were almost four years ago.
Currently, the cases are tied up in preliminary appeals about what kind of access the defendants’ lawyers can have to their clients and interminable wrangling over how to handle classified evidence, matters that a civilian criminal court would have quickly disposed of.
An actual trial is a year or more away.
The Guantanamo legal process has become an embarrassment of political meddling and courtroom procedures seemingly made up on the fly. Guantanamo makes the notoriously slow International Criminal Court in The Hague look like a rocket docket.
The latest embarrassment, likely to confirm the view of foreign skeptics who view these proceedings as bogus, was the discovery that a censorship system was being controlled outside the courtroom, unbeknownst to the judge, blocking sound and video feeds of courtroom proceedings.
The exasperated judge has constantly battled efforts by the government, especially the CIA, to declare large volumes of evidence as classified and thus unavailable to the defendants and often their lawyers.
Seemingly confirming that Guantanamo is an embarrassment that will always be with us, the State Department closed the one-person office that was charged with repatriating or resettling those prisoners cleared for release.
Since Guantanamo opened, it has had 779 prisoners. We are basically stuck with the 165 who remain.
— Scripps Howard News Service
Opinion
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Discussion
Other Views: Justice delayed
- Opinion
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Our View: Spying on us
Distrust of government secrecy has been elevated to an exceptional level with the disclosure the Justice Department covertly examined two months of Associated Press phone records to determine who leaked details to the AP about a foiled terrorist plot.
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Our View: Pass on the legacy
Forty hungry members of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry began gathering corn at the Rader farm near the village of Sherwood when they were ambushed by a guerrilla band of about 70 Southern sympathizers.
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Our View: Big Brother looms large
The federal government, working under the cloak of secrecy, has been having a heyday at the expense of all Americans.
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Our View: Disgraceful military assault
We want to make one thing clear: A sexual assault is not a sex scandal. Nor can the rise in sexual assaults in the military be justified in any way.
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Elliott Denniston, guest columnist: Right-to-work laws only hurt workers
Middle-class workers have been fighting an uphill battle for the past 30 years.
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Your View: Food drive efforts
Branch No. 366 of the National Association of Letter Carriers along with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, the American Postal Workers Union and the U.S. Postal Service would like to thank all the area communities that participated in the 2013 Stamp Out Hunger food drive.
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Your View: More about tax credit
The Globe’s editorial in “Our View” (May 10) may have left readers with a few inaccurate impressions.
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Other Views: Sickening disparity
Don’t feel bad if you don’t understand the wide, sometimes huge, discrepancies in fees hospitals charge for the same procedure. Or if you don’t understand the arithmetical magic the hospitals use to arrive at those fees.
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Carol Stark: America in need of more 'momisms'
Several years ago, I attended a writing workshop where one of the sessions was called “Tell it to Mom.”
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Our View: Keep learning
Donna Maus, a biology teacher from St. Mary’s Colgan High School in Pittsburg, Kan., told a group of top students, their parents and their teachers something we think everyone needs to hear.
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