Analysis: Guantanamo Bay is just an edifice of justice
The institutions of justice at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have a jerry-rigged character and despite Washington’s best intention, the trials staged there retain a similarly low-grade quality.
By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
The building where Salim Hamdan entered the historical annals as the first man on the US military enclave convicted of war crimes is an elderly air traffic control station. The station cum court stands on ridge overlooking an old hangar that has been set up as a press centre for the tribunal. Its insides have been hollowed out to provide a courtroom as identifiable as any featured on a television legal drama. At a distance a second purpose-built court room has been constructed as an auxiliary venue.
The overall impression is that the military has had adapt to a new challenge as best it could.
Similarly, in pushing the case against Hamdan through to a conclusion before the far more weighty and significant trials of the men accused of involvement in the September 11 atrocities, officials sought an edifice - not a solid structure - for justice on the base.
Hamdan, a member of the al-Qaeda motor pool, was a peripheral figure who at best provided a precedent for judging a raft of low level operatives on charges of association with terrorism. His case did not test the far more intractable issues of circumstances of capture, rules of detention, abuse during interrogation and standards of evidence that would matter in far more complex trials.
With the government of George W Bush staring at its final hours, many of these issues will never now face a reckoning on Guantanamo, or in the US court system, which can hear appeals of the military trails.
Whoever is elected the next president in November will close Guantanamo as quickly as possible. It has run out of time.
The naval base is divided between a windward half and a leeward side. The detention facilities were established in the windward division in 2002. From the first, the metaphorical winds buffeted Guantanamo as strongly as the metrological variety.
The first jury verdict by a military court demonstrates that it is too late to change the historical weather.
August 6th, 2008 | Category: Guantanamo, Kangaroo Kourt, Salim Hamdan
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