Guantanamo Bay Prisoners
It was announced that some of the men responsible for planning the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 will be tried in a civilian court in New York City instead of by military tribunal. This has led to some interesting points of view and some looks at how diverging people see the law in a case like this.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay Prison for years as prisoners of war. Mohammed was captured in 2003, and supposedly was waterboarded, left naked months at a time, and was often questioned by female interrogators, supposedly a form of torture based on the radicalism of his religious beliefs. There was a lot of evidence found that should probably convict him.
The major worry, however, is that once in a civilian court, lawyers will be able to eliminate anything he might have said while being “tortured”, and that, with some improbability, he and his cohorts could actually either be found not guilty, or have much of the government’s evidence thrown out in a chain of custody matter of some sort. That possibility is scary enough for many people to believe that allowing this case to go on it a civilian courtroom, ironically less than a mile away from where the Twin Towers went down, is a risk that the government, most specifically attorney general Eric Holder, shouldn’t be taking.
On the other side, the attorney general’s feelings are that the acts of this man and the others were not necessarily done in a time of war, and therefore qualify more under civilian laws than military laws. Detaining someone at Guantanamo Bay is argued as something done under the Bush Administration, not under the Obama Administration, which views some of the detainees there in a much different light.
Of course, there are some other worries. One, where will an impartial jury be found? Two, how will security be able to hold up? Three, will the federal government have any say in how the trial goes? And four, what happens if the unthinkable does happen and these men are supposedly set free in some fashion?
Supposedly, the federal government could just re-arrest these men and plop them back into federal custody. If that’s the case, why waste time on a civilian trial? Holder says it’s owed to the American public to see this trial go forward, for closure in the tragedy that occurred. This is one case the administration had better not mess up.
