GITMO TRIALS RIGGED TO END IN CONVICTION?

Here's another gem from http://DemocracyNow.org/. On yesterday's show, they reported on the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo�s military commissions who told the Nation magazine that there was no way any of those six guys accused of taking part in the 911 attacks would get a fair trial. Here's a bit from the show's transcript (get the whole thing here: http://www.democracynow.org/…guantanamo ): "The 9/11 trials for the six Guantanamo prisoners charged by the Pentagon last week with conspiracy to commit war crimes might have been rigged from the start to rule out the possibility of any acquittals, this according to the latest statements to The Nation magazine from Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo�s military commissions.



Colonel Davis recounted a 2005 meeting with the Bush administration-appointed Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the prosecutions and the defense for the tribunal process. Haynes said, �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.�



Colonel Davis resigned from the military commissions in October 2007, saying the system had become �politicized� and he could no longer be effective. His latest statements to The Nation magazine offer the most pointed evidence of the military commission�s bias and undermine the Bush administration�s claims of ensuring fair trials for the accused."



Weeee! This is the biggest thorn in my side regarding all of this "Post-911 Thinking" going on. In one of our country's founding documents we make the statement that all humans are equal, right? I'm paraphrasing, but that's what is accepted, right?



Well, the exact phrasing is: "all men are created equal."



Please note: it doesn't say that all "Americans" are created equal.



Therefore, EVERY human on the planet deserves the same rights as any American citizen.



So, even if these six guys in Gitmo are guilty of what they are accused of, they STILL deserve a fair trial! I don't care if they're criminals, war criminals or "enemy combatants" (whatever the hell those are). They should still get fair trials and the same rights any other human gets.



If we don't provide what we promise how can anyone outside of the US trust what any of us say?



Now, to me, this doesn't sound like the trials are rigged. However, if the guys in charge of the trials say something like "there can be no acquittals" you have to admit, that screams "unfair bias" all over the damn place.



Just a sidenote here: there have been no convictions for the 911 attacks. There have been just a handful of convictions of terror suspects involved in other attacks not on US soil. We've invaded two countries and ended hundreds of thousands of lives in the interest of catching terrorists, yet we can't seem to convict hardly anyone in a court of law.



How much you wanna bet those six dudes in Guantanamo have exactly nada to do with 911?
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