America:Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, got some good news this week when Guantánamo's former chief prosecutor said he will testify at an April 28th hearing - in Hamdan's defence.
Hamdan faces the possibility of life imprisonment if he is convicted of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.
Col Morris Davis, who resigned last October, described the hearing as "an opportunity to tell the truth" about trials at Guantánamo he claims are rigged to ensure that none of the inmates are acquitted.
Col Morris told The Nation magazine about a conversation he had in 2005 with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, the man who now oversees the tribunal process at Guantánamo, in which Haynes compared the tribunals to the Nuremberg trials at the end of the second World War.
Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.
"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued: "At which point, [ Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.' " Davis's resignation last October came hours after he heard that Haynes had been put above him in the chain of command that runs the military tribunals at Guantánamo. A political appointee, Haynes's role as Pentagon general counsel puts him in charge of the prosecution and the defence, as well as the judges or the Guantánamo tribunals.
The Pentagon disputes Davis's account of the conversation but it chimes with complaints made by military prosecutors in leaked internal e-mails in 2004. Capt John Carr, one of three prosecutors who asked to be transferred from the military tribunals that year, wrote that his superior told him that the tribunals appeared to be rigged.
"When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused," he wrote.
"Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged." Capt Carr wrote that the prosecutors had been told by the chief prosecutor that the panel sitting in judgment on the cases would be hand-picked to ensure convictions.
"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be hand-picked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," he wrote.
Military lawyers have been complaining about political interference in their work since the start of the "war on terror", standing up to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the authorisation of extreme interrogation techniques that are classified as torture by the Geneva Conventions.
When the Bush administration put forward the Military Commissions Act, which governs the tribunals at Guantánamo, the top lawyers from the four branches of the armed services went to Capitol Hill and testified against the legislation.
This month, the administration announced that six Guantánamo detainees would be put on trial for their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks and could face the death penalty. Around the same time, senior administration officials, including attorney general Michael Mukasey, lined up to declare that waterboarding - a form of controlled drowning - was not illegal, although it was no longer used by the US in interrogations.
If any of the six detainees who face a capital trial were subjected to waterboarding or if evidence against them was gained through the use of the technique, would such evidence be admissible?
Writing in the New York Timeslast week, Col Morris argued that the logical consequence of rejecting waterboarding as a technique was clear.
"Why a few others in positions of power still find it so difficult to admit the obvious about waterboarding is astounding," he wrote. "We can never retake the moral high ground when we claim the right to do unto others that which we would vehemently condemn if done to us . . . An obvious step is to prohibit the use of evidence derived by waterboarding in criminal proceedings against detainees."
