11.18.2010

Stick a fork in it, Bunky, we need us a hangin' judge

Terror cases: US may have to use military courts - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Obama administration may now be forced to rely on military tribunals to try "war on terror" suspects after a New York jury cleared the first ex-Guantanamo inmate brought to a civilian court of almost all charges, experts said Thursday.

"The verdict has offered a vision of the nightmare scenario -- acquittal in a terrorism case involving a high value detainee -- and that vision will be enough to ramp up the already intense pressure not to try something like this again," said legal expert Benjamin Wittes from the Brookings Institution....

"The only thing that will matter in the political sphere will be that prosecutors won a conviction on only one of 285 criminal counts -- that they came within a hair's breath of losing the case entirely," he said.

JIC you had any misunderrefudiations about "justice" in mind.

My problem with all this is just that I'm so friggin' old I remember the Cold War era when those evil godless Commies put guys on trial, guys who had been tortured into confessions, and finding them guilty in what we called "show trials" and roundly condemned. And I wish I didn't remember that because it really spoils all the fun.

 

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