1115.org

It is now starting to become clear why Alberto Gonzales‘ Justice Department and Donald Rumsfeld’s military were so damned determined to deny the most basic legal rights to Guantánamo detainees, why they resisted so strongly at every turn.

Because they knew perfectly well that we weren’t even equal to the relatively straightforward task of holding show trials. Clapping them in irons we could handle. Making them walk the plank, no problem. But going through the motions of producing them before a judge or tribunal, and pronouncing sentence upon them, not so much.

First they decided exactly what they wanted to do to the detainees (namely, bugger them fifty ways to Friday). Then they got to dictate the legislation that would be passed to make this buggering legal.

I guess Attorney General Gonzales must have been too busy pleasuring the President in other ways. Because, according to two different military judges on Monday, they managed to get it all spectacularly wrong.

So when the first detainee was tried under The Military Commissions Act that was hurriedly passed by Congress — hurriedly at Bush’s insistence — after a Supreme Court decision had scrapped the original Guantánamo tribunal system, all charges against him had to be dropped. Ditto with the second, in very swift succession.

Can’t rightly say what happened to the third. Because the fact of the matter is that only two of the 380 detainees at Guantánamo have been brought to trial so far.

And all charges had to be dropped because the tribunals are empowered only to try “unlawful enemy combatants”, and the Guantánamo detainees have all been designated — very formally, and with great pomp and ceremony — as “enemy combatants”.

I do believe that any real lawyer should be able to realize that there’s a meaningful difference between the two terms. If so, all the real lawyers seem to have been assigned to the defense. The prosecution — and the government machinery that comprises their vast supporting cast — seems to have been totally blindsided. Or maybe they just expected justice to be blind? Blind, that is, to relevant legal niceties.

The funniest part, though, is not that all charges were suddenly dismissed against Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan in separate proceedings on Monday.

(Incidentally, Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since he was 15. The U.S. is the first country in modern times to bring war crimes charges against someone who was a child when the alleged crimes were committed. And Hamdan’s name already looms large in the annals of TWAT’s legal history, since it was his appeal that led the Supreme Court to scrap the original Guantánamo tribunal system. Which in turn led to The Military Commissions Act. Which had a starring role in Monday’s comic turn, in which the Bush administration so memorably plastered their own faces with pie.)

No, the funniest part is that the government has 72 hours to appeal the dismissal of these charges. But they are not going to be able to appeal:

In Washington, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department planned to appeal. But Brownback (who issued the Khadr ruling), a retired military judge, scoffed at that idea when prosecutors raised it on Monday, saying there was no court to which the government could appeal.

Congress authorized the Defense Department to establish a Court of Military Commission Review to handle appeals, but the court has yet to be set up. Defense Department officials said Monday they didn’t know when appointments to the court would be made.

Poetic justice doesn’t come any purer than this. The government obviously never expected that they would be the ones needing to file appeals. So now they are hoist by their own kangaroo court petard.

Somewhere a topless lady wearing a blindfold and holding aloft the scales of justice is giggling her sides off. And she may also be saying: “Well said!” to Jumana Musa:

Said Amnesty International observer Jumana Musa: “At this point, detainees have been more successful committing suicide in Guantánamo than the government has been successful in getting detainees to trial.”