Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, has just been found guilty of war crimes at a military tribunal held at Guantanamo Bay. He could face life imprisonment after a jury of six US military officers selected by the Pentagon found he had transported two surface-to-air missiles in his car which would be used against US forces during their invasion of Afghanistan.
Prosecutor Colonel Laurence Morris was quoted as saying: “We are confident that we can try cases to the highest standards of justice.”
Justice? What kind of justice? Did Hamdan have access to all the evidence used to try him? Who was this evidence obtained from? How was it obtained?
In his recently published book, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law, international law professor Phillipe Sands QC exposes unethical Defense Department lawyers joining forces with neo-conservative politicians to produce the Acton Memo. This document, signed by Donald Rumsfeld on 2 December 2002, enabled interrogators at Guantanamo Bay (and later at Abu Ghraib) to lawfully commit acts of torture in violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.
Only a week ago, al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj was released after over six years at the Guantanamo facility. Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, first detained at age 16, remains in custody. He wasn’t the only prisoner sent to Guantanamo as a minor. This 2006 list of detainees shows a number aged in the early 20s who must have been minors when they first arrived at Guantanamo.
Compare this to the procedures used to detain and try Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who led the 1990s war in Bosnia that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Bosnians of all denominations and that included the establishment of concentration camps and gang-rape of tens of thousands of women. In the town of Srebrenica alone, over 7,000 men and boys were slaughtered.
Karadzic is being tried by a UN War Crimes Tribunal. There have been no suggestions of torture at this tribunal. None of the evidence will be withheld from Karadzic, and he will be free to engage lawyers if he wishes. Compared to the cages in which many Guantanamo detainees (including David Hicks) were kept, Karadzic’s prison cell looks more like a 5-star hotel.
At its recent Big Ideas Forum, the Centre for Independent Studies asked five prominent speakers to talk about “Protecting the Legacy of Freedom: The Ideas of The Enlightenment in the 21st Century”.
Not a single speaker mentioned the Guantanamo gulag or Radovan Karadzic. Sitting through that spectacle of self-congratulatory pomposity, I couldn’t help but think of Mahatma Gandhi’s response when asked what he thought of Western civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea”. We live in a world where terror suspects are kept in secret prisons and gulags and tried by military commissions, while war criminals are afforded civilised treatment and a fair trial. Perhaps Gandhi was right all along …
It’s a great shame that Irfan Yusuf undermines his dissection of the horrors of Guantanamo Bay by falling hook line and sinker for the claim that the victors court in The Hague is a citadel of ustice.
Irfan unfortunately aggravates his offence by labelling Karadzic as a “war criminal ” before even this tribunal has heard any evidence. As a criminal defence lawyer I reject such an approach.
Of, course, Irfan may have been talking as a realist accepting the inevitability that this court will find Karadzic guilty unless it psychologically harrasses him to death as it did to Milosevic.
By the way Irafn -mate you really need to stay at different hotels if you truly think the depressing lttle(15 sq m) cell Kaadzic is in is anything like a 5 star hotel.
Greg Adler
Look, I know there are complicated arguments behind all of this, but I am still dumbfounded at some deep level: someone fighting a war on one side (the home side) can be ‘justly’ tried by the legal standards of the other (the invader, no less)?
I submit myself to the law of the land I live in because I made that choice. That’s different for invasion. And its also different for genocide.
The Hague is an extension of a hegemony of ‘universal’ human rights. I tend to agree with them, so I can stomach that okay.
The military trial at Guantanamo is an extension of a claim that the US’s values are universally applicable. I can’t stomach that. (Even though I’m no fan of the Taliban – but go see ‘Charlie’s War’ for an entertaining hint at a backstory).
There’s a lot of criticism about the procedural fairness of these various trials. But where is the decrying of blindingly obvious elephant in the room – the basic rationale of these systems of justice?
Guantanamo is a travesty of principle. It represents a dangerous arrogance: dangerous in what it says about the responsible nation; dangerous in the weakness and acquiescence of the rest of the world in (failure in) opposing it, and; dangerous in the confusion it generates, that undermines more worthy systems (imperfect though they may be) like the International Court.
Sure, sure, we’re all worldly cynics, we know this – but we have already lost if we don’t continue to say it. Look at Ghandi – he made great progress by stating the bleeding, unjust, obvious.
It seems that we have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ villains in our justice systems. Hun Sen, Hasim Thaci, Naser Oric, Izetbegovic are ‘good’ ones. And Osama Bin Laden does not seem to attract much attention any more.
His driver does.
Just wondering if the Rwanda’s government is able to get the French to the Hague to testify after the claim that the French government somehow contributed to the genocide of Tutsi. And who is to decide whom should we bring to justice?
As long as any national (USA) or international (Hague) Tribunals bring to ‘justice’ selective villains or suspects there is no much hope for any justice, and the innocent civillians will continue to get killed.
Interesting argument. If you are old enough to point an AK47 at uniformed soldiers, or even willingly become/support bombing of innocent civilians, should our legal system treat you any differently from an adult?