From Gitmo to Here

People who look forward to such things are eagerly licking their chops over the prospects of putting on trial the people who now are penned up by Americans on Cuban soil, in the place called "Gitmo" for short -- that is, if B. Obama manages to stick to his vow to do away with that noxious holding tank by January, which would be exactly one year after his inaugration..

But it all makes me wonder what ever happened to the idea of a "jury of one's peers?" That concept seems to have disappeared completely down the legal drainage hole, some time during the GWBush years, hard on the heels of the wholesale dumping of another high principle of yesteryear that today is expressed only with an accompanying smirk: You know, the one about how a person is not considered to be guilty unless a trial determines him to be so? That must've been a precept of more innocent times. So are we now in guilty times?

I know, I know. The original intention was to try the Gitmo detainees in military courts, and the military has license to be far more lawless than do civilians. So for instance, by merely having been chained up with no sign of anything resembling a trial for getting close to 10 years by now, the accused are serving sentences anyhow, regardless of their guilt or innocence, though that adds another question to the things sullying American justice in recent times, and that is, whatever happened to the doctrine of due process?

I know, I know. In a war nations give themselves permission to act in more criminal ways than usual.

The trials seem to be slated for places not far from where I sit, in Virginia. That state may have been picked because the Pentagon, one of the targets of 9/11, is there, though just barely. But it helped that the Government did not want to try these men in New York, though the lion's share of the 9/11 damage was done there. Virginia is better because it is thought to be more conservative. So the Government, like prosecutors in many other venues, rather than trying to get at the real truth of the matter, seems to have decided that the ultimate truth really rests in how hard-hearted and vengeance-minded a jury is. And if they want to rack up a good score, given a choice, states like Virginia, Oklahoma, and Idaho are the places to try people, just as, when it comes to countries in general, for getting convictions the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia are to preferred over jurisdictions like Great Britain, France, or Norway.

This difference in attitudes is being sharply illustrated these days by the fuss caused when Scottish officials gave indications that they are preparing to release from prison for compassionate reasons a man who was found guilty of having had a hand in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing that killed 270 people. Now prostate cancer has put him, as an apparently British expression puts it, "over the moon," and the Scots are thinking of allowing him to spend his last several weeks or months in Libya. But even among the relatives of those who died, there is a definite difference of opinion between the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic, with Americans adamantly opposing the man's release, no matter how close he is to his end, while reactions in the British isles are helped along by some uncertainty about how guilty he really is...

Till now the terrorism cases that have been tried in Virginia were held in Alexandria, just outside of D.C., but upcoming trials could be held at a brand new courthouse in Newport News instead That area over in the Tidewater has the "virtue" of being thought of as being more conservative than Northern Virginia, though another consideration is that Newport News isn't as built up as Alexandria and so is better for security reasons.

These Gitmo trials will be just for show and local consumption anyway, Usually in criininal trials the focus is on the people who actually did the deed, and though modern justice is going ever harder in the direction of also pulling in any one else who might've had the least little connection with the perpetrators, those accomplices are still just secondary and tertiary. And as the 20 or so 9/11 murderers and hijackers were all disintegrated along with their victims, they can't be tried, and meanwhile it's hard to see why so much is still being made about trying to catch Osama Bin Laden. If he is still alive, which I doubt -- I've read that he has severe kidney troubles, and the years since 2001 are a long time to go around hiding while fighting that -- he can't be too concerned about the consequences of being nabbed. No punishment would begin to approach the horror of what his crews did, so that from his point of view his victory is complete and nothing can be taken away from it.

But things can be added to it, and that is what the GWBush administration did, with its tactics that actually damaged the U.S. even more, by taking away so many of the country's civil liberties with measures such as the Patriot Act and the wiretapping stuff. And if he's not careful, B. Obama may end up doing some of the same.

Progressive sources such as the Hullabaloo site, which in a 12 August post attacked the Obama administration for a "rendition" involving a Lebanese guy arrested recently in Afghanistan not for terrorism but for fraud and spirited far across the lands and the seas to none other than here in Virginia for trial, with allegedly a touch of torture thrown in -- are often on Obama's case for appearing to continue the Bush/Gitmo policies. But I think that what he is doing is trying not to rock the "War on Terror" boat too much, while he casts about, looking for the best way to deal with these matters and the best times, which isn't easy to determine.

It's akin to a man buying a house near which is a wonderful garden spot. But after moving in he discovers that the previous owner had used that spot to bury -- just barely -- a number of recently deceased horses. But as he must have the use of that spot regardless, the new owner is faced with digging up and moving that huge mass of putrefying remains, though the terrible aroma and the mess are sure to arouse fierce opposition wherever he might want to put it.