Michel Paradis:
I wouldn't put my money on it, to be perfectly candid. These men have been in Guantanamo or at least in US custody since, I think, 2003. They have been theoretical targets for prosecution since 2010 without any action by either the the Obama or Trump administrations in that direction. It's only, again, this parting shot by an official sort of very deep down in the Department of Defense.
But to give you a measure of how any trial might go, the 9/11 conspirators, the five 9/11 conspirators have been facing trial since 2008. There's no trial date set yet. They're not looking to actually have a trial in that case, probably for years and maybe never. The one, the only thing that has been true about the military commissions, which are these tribunals created in Guantanamo, has been that they are dysfunctional. They are constantly beset by errors and and issues that would never occur in the federal court. To give you just one example, in the 9/11 case, I think they've now had six judges in the past two years. And you can't blame all of that dysfunction on the COVID-19 pandemic.
The only thing that has been unflagging, true about the military commissions is delay and one thing after another, whether it's the six judges now in the past two years in the 9/11 case, whether it's judges in some of the other cases who were actually applying for jobs secretly with the government and therefore required the Court of Appeals to throw out years of their proceedings on the grounds of essentially judicial corruption — one thing after another has made these, sort of, these trials into a 'Waiting for Godot' experience. They're the trials that everyone's waiting for but never come.
And these three Indonesians, if, assuming the Biden administration doesn't take fairly rapid steps to to pull back that order to prosecute them, they're going to be in some form of rope-a-dope trial process for the next decade. And I think it's really just a startling feature of Guantanamo and the military commissions that we actually are having fairly realistic conversations about the 9/11 case not actually being resolved until the people who were not yet born on September 11th are approaching middle age.
And I think that's, that's a tragedy. That's a deep tragedy for this country. It's a tragedy for the victims. I live in New York. It's a tragedy for all New Yorkers who still every time, you know, if you're of a certain age like I am, every time you see the Freedom Tower, you're reminded of the two towers that aren't there anymore. And it's a scar on our country that has yet to heal. And Guantanamo is the primary reason that scar continues to fester.
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