From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

This has been another terrible week for Guantánamo’s Military Commissions, established by Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001 to try, convict and execute those responsible for 9/11 through a novel process so far removed from the US court system and the military’s own judicial procedures that the tainted fruit of torture would be allowed, and secret evidence could be withheld from the accused.

Struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, the Commissions stumbled back to life later that year in the hastily passed and virtually unscrutinized Military Commissions Act (which, for good measure, stripped the Guantánamo detainees of the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court in 2004), but they have struggled to establish any kind of credibility.

Now apparently shorn of evidence obtained through torture (although evidence obtained through “coercion” can be allowed at the discretion of the government-appointed military judges), the Commissions were supposed to spring back to muscular life two weeks ago, when the administration finally got around to charging six men in connection with the 9/11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”

However, although the charges finally brought 9/11 back into the spotlight, the issue of torture – and the administration’s increasingly desperate attempts to hide the evidence of its own “extreme, deliberate and unusually cruel” practices – has clung, limpet-like, to the stories of these men, and does not look like being resolved any time soon, especially as the process of finding them military defense lawyers will, like everything else to do with the Commission’s stuttering five-year history, likely proceed at a glacial pace.

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