We Know You’re Guilty. We Don’t Need to Prove it.

We Know You’re Guilty. We Don’t Need to Prove it.

The Washington Post has
another scary dictatorship article.

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction.

In other words, Donald Rumsfeld would get to decide who gets to be tried in a regular court, and who gets a special military court. Which makes perfect sense, because a) Rumsfeld’s judgment has been Solomonic so far, and b) this decision clearly belongs in the executive branch.

Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.

Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

So it’s just like a regular trial, except that you don’t get the chance to, like, defend yourself.

John D. Hutson, the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: “We know you’re guilty. We can’t tell you why, but there’s a guy, we can’t tell you who, who told us something. We can’t tell you what, but you’re guilty.”

Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, said after reviewing the leaked draft that “the theme of the government seems to be ‘They are guilty anyway, and therefore due process can be slighted.’ ” With these procedures, Fein said, “there is a real danger of getting a wrong verdict” that would let a lower-echelon detainee “rot for 30 years” at Guantanamo Bay because of evidence contrived by personal enemies.

No one at Guantanamo has been tried to date, though some prisoners have been there since early 2002.

So, yeah. We know they’re guilty. They wouldn’t be in Gitmo if they weren’t guilty. Even if, by some chance, one or two of them haven’t actually done anything, they got picked up in Afghanistan and Iraq, so they would’ve done something terroristical sooner or later anyway. So it’s only right to lock them up forever.

But now those bleeding heart libruls are screaming for “rights” and “due process” and “habeas corpus” (which is just French for “soft on terrorism”). No problem: we’ll just legalize kangaroo courts, try them, and find them guilty, all nice and proper and legal-like. And then we can tell the lefties to STFU.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ on a Segway, what the hell’s the matter with these people? Are they not even pretending to care anymore?

For those who didn’t know, I’m Russian. I grew up hearing all sorts of horror stories about the Soviet Union, how people who dared speak out against the regime, or simply rubbed the wrong VIP the wrong way, would get disappeared in the middle of the night, given a show trial, verdict, and shipped off to Siberia, where dawn signals the arrival of spring, for a few decades.

And apparently, now that the Soviet Union is gone, this administration is working at a Stakhanovist pace to fill its shoes. We’ve got the ubiquitous government snooping, the wall (say, Berlin, how’d that work out for you?), the secret courts, the torture, the pervasive ultra-patriotism, the adulation of the military. Constitution Avenue’s already blocked to traffic. How about we tear up the Mall to build Red, White, And Blue Square, and widen some streets so we can have a massive missile and tank parade through it on every anniversary of the Glorious July Revolution?

Fuck that. We have a bill of rights for a reason: that unchecked power is too often abused. That’s why arrests and wiretaps (ought to) require a warrant: not to prevent the police from doing its job, but to act as a reality check: if you can’t convince a judge that you really ought to be snooping on someone, then maybe you shouldn’t.

Same here: yeah, the people in Guantanamo (and Abu Ghraib, and FSM only knows where else) got picked up in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a lot of them probably deserve to be locked up for a long time. But if so, it ought to be pretty straightforward to prove it. In the America I grew up in, if you can’t convince the judge or jury that the accused committed a crime, you have to let them go, even if you know they done it. And you can’t just keep ’em locked up forever, either.

At least, not in the America that I remember. But day by day, we seem to be turning into the Soviet Union. Just with more bling.