The defense
script for the arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants
might as well have been (literally) ghost written by Abbie Hoffman. As related by Terry McDermott in The Daily Beast:
A slow-motion circus rolled into
courtroom 2 of the Expeditionary Legal Complex Saturday morning.
What had been planned as the
straightforward arraignment of Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and four codefendants on charges of
conspiring to commit the Sept. 11 attacks disintegrated into dark comedy.
Judge James Pohl scolded attorneys
for refusing to follow his carefully articulated script for the proceeding;
lawyers argued they were not qualified to defend their clients; translators
interrupted lawyers to insist they be quiet; defendants refused to answer any
questions from the judge or even acknowledge they’d been asked; one interrupted
the proceedings first to pray and again to shout out his fears of being
attacked by members of the prosecution team; another who started the day
shackled to his chair ended it by stripping to the waist to display scars
he claims were inflicted by his Guantánamo guards.
Meanwhile,
Mohammed, the man at the center of this storm, sat quietly in the front row,
leafing through the Quran and sporting a bushy beard, newly dyed henna red.
Every circus needs its clowns, and
Cheryl Bormann, attorney for Walid Bin Attash, apparently decided to be one of
them. As reported by Jan Crawford
of CBS:
In the courtroom
today, Bormann wore traditional Muslim attire -- a black hijab and abaya. She
urged the female military prosecutors, dressed in uniform with knee-length
skirts, to consider more "appropriate" attire so the suspects won't
have "fear of committing a sin under their faith."
Bormann’s transparent attempt to
bootleg the dictates of Sharia law into a secular American military tribunal
brings to mind a Facebook post I saw last week: “Claiming that someone else’s marriage is against your
religion is like being angry at someone for eating a doughnut because you’re on
a diet.” Bormann could have easily
dealt with her client’s professed fear of sinning with a bit of attorney-client
advice that would have been wise in any case: Don’t look at the prosecutors’ legs.
Andrew Cohen offered this glum
assessment of the proceedings in The
Atlantic:
[T]he arraignment
devolved at times into farce. The defendants acted like petulant children. The
military judge acted like Lance Ito. The defense attorneys, finally given their
opportunity to vent publicly about the restrictions placed upon their clients,
made windy speeches instead of answering questions. It's the most important
tribunal in American history since Nuremberg, and if this is how it begins I
dread to think of how it will end.
On “Now With Alex Wagner,” defense
attorney Ron Kuby, a veteran of political trials, opined that the circus-like
atmosphere was largely the result of the lack of established procedure for this
tribunal, and the consequent need to “make things up as you go along.”
It didn’t have to be this way. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder
announced plans to try the defendants in a federal district court in New York
City. In response, opportunistic
politicians of both parties howled their outrage and professed to be shocked,
shocked that men accused of nearly 3,000 counts of murder would be tried in
accordance with Article III of the United States Constitution.
Had Holder been allowed to proceed as
planned, the trial would likely have been completed by now, in accordance with
well-established rules of procedure.
Instead we face the likelihood of a farcical trial sometime next year,
resulting in a verdict perceived as tainted by questions regarding the
legitimacy of the proceedings. The
case may prove to be one of our most painful examples yet of the perils of
allowing politics to dictate the workings of justice system.
One detail I neglected: According to reports, Ms. Bormann is not herself Muslim.
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