Stories My Father Told Me
By Tyler Cabot
Via Esquire (in june 09) by way of balloon juice today:
Next, most important, comes the plea. My father spent hours the night before trying to figure out how to explain this. He read the prisoner’s combatant-status review from October 2004. “I did not see bin Laden, nor did I meet him,” the prisoner told the review board at the time. “As I previously told you, I have no knowledge of Al Qaeda, and I don’t know anybody from there. But if you want to say that I’m Muslim and want to make believe I belong to Al Qaeda, then that is something different.”
It will be the same today. The prisoner will want to deny the charges against him. And why not?
But he can’t. It’s one of the peculiarities of the commission system. If he pleads not guilty, if he accedes to cooperate with the system arrayed against him in any way, he’ll be tacitly accepting the validity of the charges. He’ll be recognizing the authority of the United States of America to continue to imprison him. And he’ll forfeit the right to challenge not only the specific charges against him but the validity of the entire proceedings…