US fires Guantanamo defense team

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098618,00.html

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.

And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice.

Of the more than 600 detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo, none has been charged with any crime, and none has had access to a lawyer, although some have been in captivity of one kind or another for two years.

But the US has repeatedly promised that at least some of the prisoners will be charged and tried by military commissions, an arcane form of tribunal based on long-disused models from the 1940s.

more

[54anickel]

1. OMG this is unbelievable.

"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 'modify it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after was the military justice system changed. What we have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942."

[Judi Lynn]

2. Deeply odd, isn't it?

(snip) Yet the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate knowledge of the mood among the current military defence team, six lawyers strong, that there is deep unhappiness about the commission set-up.

"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 'modify it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after was the military justice system changed. What we have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942." (snip)

So they can literally do anything they want, with no one to stop them. They are proving it to us.

[Just Me]

3. What? "Fire" defense,...

,...attorneys,...then, what,...hire prosecutors to defend?

[MetaTrope]

8. Surprised they aren't "arresting" the defense attorneys

You know, contact with prisoners, taking notes and all.

[damnraddem]

9. Why hire extra prosecutors? How inefficient!

Just dispense with defense attorneys -- get rid of the middle-men. What good are defense attorneys anyway, given that the findings of guilty are already written? All that remains is to decide what the charges are of which the defendents are already found guilty.

[Patriot_Spear]

4. Scripting the outcome...

So dies the Constitution of the United States of America.

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine

[leetrisck]

5. Weirder & weirder

the world of george w. bush and we're paying the price

[young_at_heart]

6. Why do people like him?

Can't someone point out to them that our country is evaporating day by day?

[opihimoimoi]

7. Its because we people are so confused by the info over load

we now believe anything a "Leader" tells us.

WE are paying a very steep price. WEatch what happen when you don't take good care of your car, it soon runs ragged and gets rust. We Americans are forgetting how to take good care of our gov't with smart voting.

Some are even PROUD of NOT VOTING.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

10. Excuse me, but the so-called "elections" of 2000 and 2002 were rife with..

...massive voting irregularities beginning with the 2000 presidential election.

Let's start with exit polling, something which had been a part of the American voting scene for quite some time. It's no longer done because their data indicated that Gore was the winner in several states where he became the actual loser in 2000. The NeoCons didn't like the fact that the exit polling was indicating a choice contrarty to their own, and exit polling promptly disappeared at the beginning of the 2002 election night..

Remember all of the polls in the final days of the 2002 election indicating that quite a few Democrats were going to win by 5-10% margins? Do you remember seeing the results the next day and discovering that nearly all of those Democrats had LOST by at 3-5%?

How does that just happen?