Sociology professor Lisa Hajjar indicatively missed key legal and societal points — about putting Guantanamo's accused 9/11 perpetrators on trial

© 2021 Peter Free

 

27 September 2021

 

 

Were Soviet and Maoist ways more effective and honest . . .

 

. . .  than our decades-spanning, unlawful Guantanamo hypocrisy?

 

 

Consider the following

 

Sociology professor Lisa Hajjar — a supposed expert on "violence, torture, war crimes, human rights, and military occupations and courts" — wrote the following — about the fate of 9/11's (Guantanamo-imprisoned) alleged perpetrators:

 

 

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 passed, the five men accused of responsibility for the attacks were still awaiting trial in the Guantanamo military commission.

 

[T]wo decades after the U.S.‘s worst terrorist attack, the 9/11 case remains mired in the pretrial phase with no start date for the trial. The hearings, which resumed September 7, 2021 after a 17-month COVID-19 related suspension, were the first for the case’s new judge – the fourth officer to fill that role.

 

[T]he 9/11 case is caught between conflicting interests that play out in battles between defense teams and prosecutors over the discovery of information about what happened to the defendants during the years they were detained at CIA “black sites” – secret overseas prisons in which U.S. agents interrogated suspects.

 

The CIA . . . has no institutional interest in due process or fair trials, only in maintaining its secrets.

 

The prosecution, meanwhile, counters defense demands for more information by insisting that this trial is about the defendants’ roles in the crime of 9/11, and what happened to them afterward is unrelated to their involvement in these events.

 

[T]he pretrial logjam could largely be resolved if the government made a choice:

 

If the priority is to protect the CIA’s secrets, the death penalty should be taken off the table and plea bargain negotiations for life sentences should begin.

 

If the death penalty remains a priority, the defense should be given access to all the information they seek, including, for example, the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report about the CIA’s rendition program.

 

© 2021 Lisa Hajjar, 20 years after 9/11, the men charged with responsibility are still waiting for trial – here’s why, The Conversation (23 September 2021)

 

 

Huh?

 

First, note the Guantanamo prosecution's position:

 

 

It holds that how we got allegedly prosecutable evidence has no bearing on what that evidence purports to be.

 

That blandly delivered proposition would turn the entirety of rights-protecting American law on its head.

 

 

Evidently accepting the prosecution's reasoning, Professor Lisa Hajjar's solution to the 9/11 trial dilemma combines a blazing illogic with a societally unworkable solution:

 

 

According to Hajjar's thinking, Government can do whatever it wants — including torturing the figurative 'shit' out of us — so as to obtain the purported legal grounds to railroad us into life-long prison sentences.

 

Yet, if Government officially wants to execute us, it will have to release the details about how it got us to confess to those (apparently not-otherwise-corroborated) offenses.

 

 

Professor Hajjar's reasoning would permit Government to toss anyone, whom it dislikes, into jail forever:

 

 

by using coerced

 

and, thus presumably false

 

evidence —

 

provided (of course) that

 

(as the professor implicitly suggests)

 

authorities stop short of killing us

 

either during the initial torture

 

or

 

its subsequent incarceration process.

 

 

The moral? — If this is what passes as critical (academic) reasoning in the United States . . .

 

. . . we are doomed.

 

I'll see y'all in the gulag.

 

If I survive to get there.