Administration's New Plan For Detainee Trials: More of the Same
by TChris
Intent on circumventing the Supreme Court's pronouncement that detainees are entitled to meaningful trials, the Bush administration is drafting legislation that would rig the trials in the government's favor. Hearsay would be acceptable proof and defendants could be excluded from their own trials. Coerced confessions would be admissible unless the judge thought they were "unreliable."
Rather than requiring a speedy trial for enemy combatants, the draft proposal says they "may be tried and punished at any time without limitations." Defendants could be held until hostilities are completed, even if found not guilty by a commission.
In other words, the administration wants to continue business as usual: indefinite detentions that may eventually lead to a secret trial with no right to confront an accuser.
To shield itself from the Geneva Conventions, the administration's bill would proclaim that the Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable rights.
"This draft shows that the executive branch doesn't think the Supreme Court got the questions on the Geneva Conventions right in Hamdan," said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkley, who as a Justice Department lawyer helped draft the president's original order establishing the military commissions.
Actually, the Supreme Court thought that Yoo and the others responsible for creating the commissions didn't get it right. The administration simply doesn't want to comply with Hamdan, so its hoping to codify the procedure that the Court condemned in that decision.
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