Digby: Kangaroo Justice

The Talking Dog has posted another one of his interesting interviews with attorneys for alleged unlawful combatants, this one with Joshua Dratel, the lawyer for the Australian David Hicks, who is being held at Guantanamo. Read the whole thing, but this passage is particularly stunning:

Talking Dog: Can you briefly summarize what you in particular find unfair about the military commission process at Guantanimo?

Joshua Dratel: Basically, there are no rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs court-martials -- that's been thrown out. No standards at all. Total arbitrariness. No efforts at anything resembling fairness. Let's start with evidence and proof. People don't know this, of course.The government's "proof" consists entirely of interrogators reading from reports of their interrogations-- without any basis to challenge the underlying accounts of witnesses, such as the witnesses themselves (who have frequently been shipped out of Guantanamo) or their interpreters, or the conditions under which the statements were taken, which were frequently, to put it politely, "coercive." Just statements from the detainees themselves-- regardless of whether obtained from abuse, or coercion, even rising to torture. In the commissions, you simply can't challenge them-- you don't have access to the witnesses.