Admin PR Coup Gone Awry-Gitmo Trials Won't Interrupt Election

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Today's Must Read
By Paul Kiel - May 6, 2008, 10:13AM


Forget about the frustration at the slow pace of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. You know it's got to really burn the administration to miss a good chance for a PR coup.

But as The Washington Post reports this morning, things are moving at such a glacial pace down in sunny Guantanamo that it seems impossible at this point that any of the September 11th suspects will begin trial before the election -- or even before the Bush administration leaves office.

You know that's got to burn because of comments made by the Pentagon officials heading up the trials. The former chief prosecutor there testified that he was told that he should really push to land plea deals or indictments before the election. And another member of the prosecution team said the Pentagon's top legal adviser in its commissions office wanted to pursue certain cases ahead of others because they would "seize the imagination of the American public" and make a splash.

But the only case that seems at all likely to go to trial before the election is that of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the alleged driver for Osama bin Laden. And the pretrial hearings for that have been far from pretty -- with Gitmo's former chief prosecutor testifying about the politicization of the system, and Hamdan, who says he has been addled by torture and prolonged solitary confinement, himself proclaiming that he won't participate in what he sees as a rigged system.

The apparent problem is that it just takes a long time to work out the kinks of a made-up process. As a lawyer from Human Rights Watch puts it, "Every little detail ends up being contested, because it's an entirely new system of justice."

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