Another “Groundhog Day” as Sept. 11 Case Revisits Access to Intelligence Witnesses and...

MY COMMENT:

I am not an attorney, and reading this stuff really makes my head hurt.

Seems to me though, as soon as we allowed the Alphabet Soup guys access to the bad guys we should have let them keep them.

This mess is so convoluted and so far from anything resembling reasonable justice that I believe it is impossible to try the case as a military commission case at Gitmo.

Three judges in just a few years, motions rescinded, testimony inaccessible, disallowed, then allowed again, and millions of pages of evidence - or not.

The Military Commissions Act of 2009, which gives unlawful combatant detainees virtually the SAME rights you or I would enjoy in a federal court of law has taken the case from any semblance of a military court case.

The Law of War and Geneva Conventions allow those accused of war crimes to have the SAME rights a US military member would have, governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That would be a straight forward and fair way to proceed. But LAWFARE (challenging the political and moral will of the United States through exploitation of the American system of justice), seems to be winning the day.

The 2009 MCA, which moved us further away from a traditional military tribunal, is the Obama Administration's version of LAWFARE. They KNEW it would create a legal morass from which it may be impossible to escape.

At the center of it all is the admissibility or inadmissibility of FBI interrogations of rendered detainees who spent several years at the hands of the CIA prior to arriving at Gitmo, and then speaking with FBI agents.

Defense teams argue the FBI statements shouldn't be included because of the proximity to the time when the universally disallowed CIA information was obtained from these same detainees.

The government argues that there was sufficient separation from the CIA for the FBI interrogations, which were conducted differently than the CIA interrogations, to be admissible.

The first judge disallowed the FBI statements, the second judge reversed the first judge, and now the third judge has the decision to make, of course, after the oral arguments are made once again.

Groundhog Day for the legal teams.

Again, for me, it's time to punt.

Take it out of Gitmo, because the case not really suited to a military court of law anymore. The rules are NOT those of the UCMJ. Give it to the highest roller civilian attorneys and then make a circus out of it on the US mainland. It will make great TV.

And in the end, with a potential death penalty for KSM et. al., we could have the trials of the century leading to more drama than most people could probably handle.

Can you just see Ilhan Omar protesting the execution of the mastermind of the attacks of September 11? Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer calling for a re-trial? Every democratic presidential nominee taking pot-shots at President Donald Trump and the federal prosecutors?

We should not mess up this once in a lifetime opportunity to rival The Greatest Show on Earth. Whatever it is, it has got to be better than what's going on now at Gitmo.