Military tribunals We

Military tribunals
We're all better served by our system of public justice

Dec. 1, 2001

The president of the United States has signed an order allowing any terrorism suspect who is not a U.S. citizen to be tried by a special military tribunal. Superseding the constitutional protections afforded defendants in state and federal courts, such a trial would look far different — if anyone got a look at it — than those we’re accustomed to seeing take place.

The proceedings could be held behind closed doors. Defendants could be barred from seeing the evidence against them. Military officers would preside, and a two-thirds vote would be sufficient for conviction and sentencing. There would be no right of appeal to a higher court, only to the president who’d ordered the trial in the first place.

That certainly seems harsh, but then the actions of the terrorists were extremely harsh. Perhaps this is the treatment they deserve.

Right?

Military tribunals are the wrong recourse against terrorism suspects from both sides. They’re not fair to the suspects, and they’re not fair to the victims, in this case the American public.

It’s true that the U.S. Constitution affords citizens significant protections against this sort of treatment, and those protections have been extended to anyone on American soil. That’s important because we want our citizens to be treated fairly even when they’re in foreign countries, but it’s also important because we believe it’s the best way to administer justice.

Not being an American citizen is not sufficient reason to lose one’s constitutional privileges, nor is citizenship sufficient reason to believe someone could not be a terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was an American; we have millions of green-carded resident aliens who are obeying the laws of this nation. Defendants should be tried for their crimes, not on the basis of their nationality. To do otherwise is to undermine our cherished system of impartial justice.

The trouble with secrecy is that it short-circuits all safeguards. Under the president’s plan, anyone (because we shouldn’t assume American citizenship will protect us once we decide that not every human being deserves the same rights) could be arrested, tried and executed without ever being allowed to mount a defense, and no one outside that courtroom would have any way of knowing whether justice was served, or even who was tried. Attorney General John Ashcroft has defended his practice of not releasing the names of those he’s detained because he doesn’t want Osama bin Laden to know which of his associates we’ve captured, and that makes a certain amount of sense, assuming that the detainees actually are bin Laden’s conspirators. This plan would abandon the concept of innocence until guilt is proven; there would be no protections for the innocent.

America does have something to prove: that we can provide a fair trial for anyone under our own system, without having to resort to methods more commonly employed by the Taliban. Such a demonstration would be a dramatic victory over our opponents, whose main premise seems to be that America is a corrupt and selfish place. The terrorists’ choice of targets — our economy and our government — were hardly accidental. They were attacking what they believe America stands for, and although they missed, suspending the Constitution that makes this country what it is would hand them a victory beyond their wildest dreams.

The beauty of our system of government is that it’s designed to function no matter who is running it. Ceding responsibility for justice to military tribunals is to revert to the system of countries such as Afghanistan, governed by an unelected military. That’s not democracy, and we’ve seen that it doesn’t work. Our system can flourish in the light of day, and expediency is no reason to abandon it.