Across the pond

Yesterday six men were put on trial charged with the 9/11 atrocity. A stern-faced man in military uniform told the world that they wanted to demonstrate American justice in action. He was deluding himself. The suspects are being tried by a military court, with military prosecutors who are not experienced in American criminal law. Even the jury will be army officers, soldiers on the opposing side in the war against terror.

This is not American justice. It is a procedure cooked up by the Bush administration hoping to get convictions and satisfy the need for revenge. The system invented is more like that used in the soviet show trials of the 1930s.

This is a tragedy. Bush has squandered the huge fund of sympathy and good will the world felt after the murder of so many New York civilians by the attack on the twin towers. America would have retained this sympathy if it had put the suspects on trial in the civilian courts. It would have underlined the difference between America and those regimes which imprison would out charge and execute without due process.

The men on trial may be guilty. But we shall never know for sure. How can the Bush court decide how much of the evidence collected was tainted by the use of torture which is notoriously an unreliable method of eliciting truth when the men doing the trying believe that waterboarding and sleep deprivation is not torture?

But I should not get too gloomy.

 America is a democracy. And the cumbersome procedures the Bush administration has invented cannot get a quick result. The suspects will not be sent to the electric chair before Bush has left the White House. So the new President will have the opportunity of aborting these procedures and giving a demonstration of real American justice. The new President will also be able to do something about the other 275 suspects still held in Guanatomo Bay, who have been deprived of their freedom for years. We still do not know how badly they have been treated. We still do not know how many of them have been tortured. A proper trial would let us know the truth.

Have they been stripped naked put on the floor and submerged with water until they were on the point of drowning, which is what the civil rights lawyers would have us believe. Or have they been drinking their cup of Starbuck’s coffee whenever they ask for it as the Bush administration would have us believe.