Will this become another great perversity by the Obama administration?
The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.
The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.
The military law forbids death penalties based solely on guilty pleas for two good reasons:
- the guilty plea could be coerced
- the guilty plea could be way for people who are not guilty to commit a form of suicide.
Such has happened for example in the case of the Beatrice Six four of which had falsely confessed in a rape and murder case and were later exonerated through DNA analysis.
In the case of Guantanamo prisoners both points may very well apply. We do not know if those five detainees are guilty or if they have a death wish for other reasons. After seven years in solitary confinement, intense torture, no trial, plans of the Obama administration to keep them in indefinite detention we can reasonably assume that they simply want to end the horrors they live under.
For the administration this would be a convenient way out of its dilemma. It would not have to release prisoners, it would not have to prove any guilt, it could avoid that the torture and abuse done to those prisoners will ever be aired in a courtroom. Just let them all declare that they are guilty. Then they will be killed and the U.S. can tell the world that justice has been done and the Guantanamo problem is solved.
The whole perversion of this comes to light when one considers how the defense department force feeds prisoners that do want to kill themselves by hunger-strike. Such prisoners are put into restraint chairs have their arms and legs bound and a tube stuck through their nose into the stomach twice a day. While the International Red Cross and the World Medical Association are urging against force feeding competent prisoners the defense department proclaims:
[T]he Department [..] takes very seriously its obligation to sustain the life and health of those in its custody. We view the current policy to preserve the life and health of detainees engaging in hunger strikes, attempted suicide, or other attempted serious self-harm as consistent with that obligation and U.S. law.
To on the one side force feed prisoners to prevent them from killing themselves and now on the other side to allow such prisoners to plead guilty for this or that alleged crime to get themselves killed can only have one reason.
It is seen as a simple and legal way out for the administration. It is the most perverse justice I can think of.