Justice, or show trials?

[tagryn]

I disagree most of the time with Glenn Greenwald, but he made some valid points in his article on the planned trials of the 9-11 masterminds. Specifically: if the type of trial a person gets is dependent on how strong the evidence is against them, can this really be called "justice" or is it just what Glenn calls it, which is a show trial? On the other hand, it would be political suicide for whatever party happens to be in power were a terrorist like Kahlid Sheikh Mohommed to "pull an OJ" and wind up acquitted on a technicality (such as throwing out any evidence that may have been obtained under interrogation), or because they got a loopy jury that was sympathetic to their Islamist justifications for 9-11. OK, lets say that happens: if the plan is to not release them regardless of the trial's outcome, why bother going through the motions in the first place? Then there's the problem of having to produce much more evidence under the standards of a civilian court than a military tribunal, how sensitive intel will be handled, whether Miranda rights are applicable in a place like Afghanistan, etc. etc. Its a mess.

I think folks like Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan have it relatively easy: for Greenwald, there's no debate, every detainee should get a trial, and if they're acquitted, they must be released, period. For Sullivan, all coercive interrogation methods are wrong, regardless of circumstances, as they can't be reconciled easily with his desire for the U.S. to be seen as holding the moral highground among nations. The reality isn't nearly as clean-cut - like I said, the issue is a morass in terms of morality and ethics. I don't have the easy solutions they proport to have, but I also recognize that standing on these rhetorical islands of absolutes are easier than trying to navigate the choppy waters that first the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, have had to deal with as far as administering justice to those who wish us harm. Of course, neither of the pundits are in danger of having to be actually responsible for the consequences of their stances, since neither are anywhere close to actually being in a position to make those decisions. I'm feeling some schadenfreude that Obama is having to deal with this, after during the campaign being pretty damning of Bush's handling of it, yet finding no easy answers himself. I suspect Obama has a much better appreciation of the pressures Bush was working under, now that he's the one responsible for making the decisions. POTUS is a tough job.

I believe that under our system the standards of justice for U.S. citizens should be somewhat higher than for non-citizens. In ancient Rome, Roman citizens had many more rights under their court system than non-citizens did, and in this respect our system of law is closer to the Roman than to the English system from which our legal system is generally descended. While noncitizens have certain unalienable rights under the Constitution, they are not members of "we the people" and as such there are certain legal rights to which they are not entitled, so I'm OK with not extending the full rights and privileges of the legal system to non-citizens, if that's where we eventually come down on. The obligation to defend a non-citizen's rights (beyond the unalienable ones mentioned in the Constitution) falls primarily to the nation of which they are citizens. There's human rights issues, to be sure (again, "inalienable rights"), but I'm not so certain that things such as full Miranda rights and complete legal representation should fall under that. So, when it comes to these morally murky corners such as how to give justice to Guantanamo detainees, that none (?) of them are U.S. citizens does enter into the equation, as far as I'm concerned.

Discussion on this topic at Winds of Change