Complete Disorder

As part of a grueling week in which I’ll be writing a piece almost every day for the Washington Independent — no one to blame but myself for that, as I overpitched this week — here’s something I put together about the lunacy at Guantanamo Bay today with KSM’s attempted guilty pleas. I’m guessing that most of the day-stories tomorrow won’t actually focus on the question of coercion in the plea, and that’s why I wrote this.

According to the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which governs the tribunals, evidence obtained through coercive means is inadmissible. “A statement obtained by use of torture shall not be admissible in a military commission,” states Sec. 948r, subsection B. Subsequent sections of the act, however, permits a judge to determine the admissibility of certain evidence “in which the degree of coercion is disputed,” particularly in the case of evidence obtained before passage of a 2005 law meant to safeguard the human rights of detainees.

Stacy Sullivan, another counterterrorism adviser with Human Rights Watch, said the Military Commissions Act is unclear on what happens if a guilty plea is allegedly coerced from a detainee. “It’s not clear whether a judge can accept the plea or if there has to be a jury” empaneled to accept it, she said. If the act requires the empanelment of a jury for a pretrial hearing, it would create a new complication to a process fraught with difficulty since its inception.

U.S. Army Col. Steven Hendley, the presiding judge in the case, said he would hold a separate hearing to determine whether he can, in fact, accept the pleas, Sullivan said.

Interestingly, something Sullivan pointed out to me that comes later in the piece is that there’s a question whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, not the U.S., coerced the guilty pleas out of his co-d’s. They basically stopped collaborating with the military commissions after he refused to accept a lawyer. So did KSM throw this whole thing into turmoil?