-
sponsorship
Also, our point wasn’t to issue any sort of blanket indictment of military justice, or American justice, as a whole. To the contrary. Same government, yes, but very different rules—and in the traditional court systems, it’s the courts that make those rules, not the executive branch. Not so for the tribunals. That was one of the main bases in the first place for Salim Hamdan's suit challenging the commissions in. In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in his favor, Congress got into the act, both verifying the Bush administration's call to establish the tribunals and demanding a higher standard of due process for them. We'll find out in June, presumably, how that sits with the justices.
-
sponsorship
Eric, I don’t think you’ve correctly stated the Bazelon/Lithwick standard here: It’s not that all Pentagon balking is per se evidence of crap commissions. It’s that the balking, plus the seven years of after-the-fact tinkering (the CSRT “do-overs” or the Bush-appointed Court of Military Commission Review), plus the international condemnation, plus the choose-your-own-ending playbook are evidence of crap commissions. Your characterization of our argument as “so long as the insiders balk, the commissions must be flawed” overstates the point. Our point was that when even the insiders start to revolt, it’s hard to ignore what everyone else has known all along.
-
sponsorship
Eric, we're fast approaching the end of my French vocabulary, and I really don't want to resort to using Google's translator to keep up with this conversation. But I think you're misapplying the Catch-22 standard to the French sentencing decision announced yesterday. It is true that the French court relied on some classified evidence to reach its verdict. But this was not la justice à huis clos, or justice behind closed doors. The French system, like ours, provides for the use of classified material. The material was fully disclosed to the parties involved—prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the finder of fact (in this case, French judges). The court subsequently reached a verdict, relying in part on that secret evidence.
Although the public may never see the actual classified evidence produced in the case, I think the public may trust the verdict because of its faith in the court as an institution, and the public faith in the court's mechanisms for managing classified information in the interests of justice. Compare and contrast this with the military commissions at Gitmo—where we have no faith in the institution, no faith in its procedural mechanisms, and very little confidence that it will handle classified material in a way that furthers justice.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?