EDITORIALS
The judge rules
Allred upholds tradition and honor by rejecting evidence brutally acquired
Updated: 07/24/08 6:36 AM
Some American military officers guard the United States with a rifle, or an artillery brigade, or a fighter plane.
U. S. Navy Capt. Keith Allred has only a gavel. And a tradition of military justice that goes back to George Washington.
The battle has just begun, but Allred, the judge in the first U. S. war crimes trial since World War II, indicated Monday that he takes seriously his duty to defend the rule of law in an American court, even in an improvised court set up by his civilian masters for the express purpose of skirting the finer points of justice.
The first of what may be 80 war crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, opened Monday with Allred’s ruling that the case against accused al-Qaida terrorist Salim Hamdan may proceed. But, he ruled, it will have to go on without information obtained from brutal interrogations carried out while the man described as Osama bin Laden’s driver was being held in Afghanistan.
“The interests of justice are not served by admitting these statements because of the highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made,” Allred ruled.
Hamdan was nabbed at a checkpoint in Afghanistan in November 2001 and held by U. S. forces at outposts at Panjshir and Bagram. At Bagram, Hamdan was kept in isolation 24 hours a day with his hands and feet bound, beaten, ordered to speak by captors who were at that moment ramming their knees into his back and warned that at least one other suspect had been beaten so badly that he died.
The fact that military prosecutors even asked to have such evidence introduced at a proceeding held under American law is scandalous. And the evidence that Allred has agreed to allow, including statements allegedly made by Hamdan during his years of confinement at Guantanamo, is something that not only remains ethically troubling but clearly threatens to have the whole case tossed out whenever it makes its way into the civilian appeals courts where it, and others, are certainly and correctly headed.
The evidence that so far has not been produced, or even hinted at, is why the Bush administration and a frighteningly compliant Congress had to create an ugly system of so-called military commissions when complementary systems of civilian and military law have been handling, with fits and starts, every challenge that has been placed before them for more than two centuries.
The risks that the innocent will be convicted while the guilty are handed multiple grounds for appeal are equally present in this illegitimate and unnecessary system.
Even as the Hamdan case was getting under way Monday, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey was calling for more congressional action to make clear the administration’s authority to hold such trials, to hold suspects indefinitely without trial, or to continue to hold them even if they are acquitted, based on the executive branch’s own unreviewable opinion as to who is and is not a danger.
Allred’s ruling was a small step in the right direction, taken by a military officer who has been given an unclear and troubling mission and who, like other officers who have challenged the administration’s contempt for the rule of law, will have to stand his post armed only with a knowledge of the law and the finest traditions of American justice.
