Defense attorneys spied on, files missing, emails accessed – what next?
Kangaroo Court: 1.) a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted
For years, activists have been referring to the military tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay as a “kangaroo court.” Evidence pouring in from the island compound and from the U.S Military Commissions office in Washington indicate this invective may have finally found its mark.
Why? For one, the government admitted last week that “hundreds of thousands” of defense lawyers’ emails were turned over to the prosecution, ostensibly “by accident.” This, after it was reported a day earlier that a huge trove of documents stored by defense counsel (U.S military and civilian lawyers tasked with providing the Gitmo detainees fair and adequate representation) were “lost” – poof! – into the ether without a trace and somewhat predictably.
We say “predictably,” because I wrote a story last year that quoted several attorneys in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel at the U.S Military Commissions in D.C who said they did not trust that the prosecution or any other federal government agency were not already peeking at their files through a back door built into the government network. They complained that, because they were forced to use Department of Defense computers for all official business – including communications with other attorneys about specific cases – and because they were being forced to sign user authorization agreements that allowed the Pentagon access to their log-ins and passwords for “security” and “maintenance,” they could not maintain their professional oaths and duty to uphold client- attorney privilege and confidentiality and exhaustive representation for their clients.
In other words, everything they feared would happen it turns out has happened, and since this is an evolving story, we don’t yet know how much damage is has done. But we can start to size it up: it’s beginning to look now that the government never really cared much about giving the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay a “fair” trial, at least in any way American jurisprudence would recognize, and that the tribunals are just an elaborate series of smoke and mirrors deployed to give a sheen of legality to what is clearly the more immediate intent of detaining foreigners indefinitely without charge and interrogating them how the government wants and under the military’s own rules.
Click for Full Text!