On Tuesday, the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay are scheduled to start up again, this time hearing yet more procedural arguments in the case against the five alleged plotters of the 9/11 attacks.
More than 14 years after the attacks, not only haven't the men been tried yet, but lawyers are still arguing over a host of questions that are totally irrelevant to whether the men are guilty. These include:
1) Can female military guards at Guantanamo escort the defendants from their cells without violating their religion?
2) When will the Defense Department provide the detainees' lawyers with a translator with the necessary security clearances who wasn't previously working for the CIA and implicated in their clients' torture?
and
3) Are the defendants getting proper medical treatment for the conditions that apparently resulted from the CIA abuse?
None of this seems to be getting us any closer to a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged al Qaeda compatriots. Although the case was filed in this latest version of the commissions four years ago, no trial date has yet been set.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear a petition from another Guantanamo detainee charged in the military commissions, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who's asking the court to dismiss the charges against him. Charged with plotting the bombing of a U.S. Navy ship docked in Yemen in 2000, al-Nashiri has likewise been at Guantanamo for nearly a decade without a trial. His lawyers claim his case doesn't belong in the military commissions at all, because the military courts were created to try war crimes, and in 2000, the United States was not at war. It's a good point.
Both of these cases highlight a key question: Why is the Obama administration pursuing these prosecutions in the military commissions at all? Widely criticized for their delays and ineptitude, the commissions are hardly the appropriate venue for trying the deadliest acts of terrorism ever committed against the United States.
U.S. federal courts, on the other hand, have successfully tried hundreds of alleged terrorists. The civilian justice system also has far more laws holding terrorists accountable than does the military system, which, as al-Nashiri's case underscores, has extremely limited jurisdiction.
President Obama has been saying for the past eight years that he wants to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Although Congress hasn't made it easy, his insistence on continuing to prosecute these cases in the military commissions only undermines the credibility of his convictions, not to mention the United States' reputation for respecting the rule of law.