According to media reports, during Omar Khadr’s Guantanamo military commission sentencing hearing last month, the prosecutor importuned the jury, composed of U.S. military officers, to “send a message” to the world and impose a 25-year prison sentence on Mr. Khadr. Given that notwithstanding the rhetoric, Mr. Khadr’s potential prison sentence had been capped – unbeknownst to the jury – by an agreement between the prosecution and defense at eight years (many of which would be spent in Canadian custody), just what message did the prosecutor have in mind for the world? That if there was still anyone on the planet who had not yet concluded that the military commissions constitute an utter farce, this disingenuous grandstanding should close the matter forever?
Indeed, little could be more emblematic of the continuing gulf between the Guantanamo military commissions and reality, between them and transparency, and between them and an honest system of justice, than the prosecutor’s brazen insult to that jury and the public at large. Imagine those jurors’ reactions when they learned, after their jury service concluded, that the same prosecutor who implored them to vindicate the sacrifice of a U.S. soldier killed in battle with a lengthy sentence had earlier proposed to Mr. Khadr, and agreed to in writing, that eight-year maximum that also bound the judge.
Why, Mr. Prosecutor, they may have asked, did you expect us to treat this offense so much more seriously than you had, than the government had, in offering Mr. Khadr the eight-year term? Was it just more of the same – claiming for craven political purposes that the detainees constituted the “worst of the worst” while manifesting the very opposite by releasing the vast majority without even charges, much less adjudications? Was it pursuit of some meaningless statistic – so you could claim a 25-year sentence when the reality was a mere third of that figure? Was it because the Guantanamo military commissions are, and have always been, some perverse shell game that demeans all its participants by enticing them to behave as though their hard work and diligence serve some purpose, and that devalues justice by pretending that justice is the objective while its architects deliberately designed and engineered it to achieve something considerably less?
Perhaps worse is that nearly nine years down the road from Guantanamo’s opening, the press is completely inured to the whole Guantanamo fiasco. Press reports called the prosecutor’s plea for the 25-year sentence “largely symbolic” – how about “entirely dishonest” instead? Yet the press by and large accepted the “show” sentencing – which for now must suffice, deprived as the press was of the Khadr “show” trial – at face value, rather than recognizing it as merely the latest example of Guantanamo’s three-card monte legal culture.
The prosecutor’s lie to the jury merely reinforces Guantanamo’s deliberate sleight of hand: proffer the ersatz while hiding the truth. The vast divide between the truth and what the commission prosecutor told the Khadr jury would be just a cruel joke on the jury if there were not still 174 human beings subject to a system that treats them with even less respect and candor than it treated the Khadr jury.
Copyright ©2010 by Joshua L. Dratel
