Amendment would allow 9-11 terrorist to plead guilty

NY Times:

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 proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.

The proposal would ease what has come to be recognized as the government’s difficult task of prosecuting men who have confessed to terrorism but whose cases present challenges. Much of the evidence against the men accused in the Sept. 11 case, as well as against other detainees, is believed to have come from confessions they gave during intense interrogations at secret C.I.A. prisons. In any proceeding, the reliability of those statements would be challenged, making trials difficult and drawing new political pressure over detainee treatment.

Some experts on the military commissions said such a proposal would raise new questions about the fairness of a system that has been criticized as permitting shortcuts to assure convictions.

David Glazier, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has written about the commission system, said: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.”

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I don't have a problem with this amendment at all. Glazier does not say what the international problem is, but I suspect that the anti death penalty lobby would still complain even if they were put on trial and convicted without the guilty plea. These guys should be allowed to plead guilty because they are obviously guilty. It is not just the statements they made during coercive interrogation that proves their guilt. There is no real problem with revealing that information, in fact much of it has already been revealed.

Where the problem comes in is revealing other sources and methods of information gathering. I have noted that the revelation in the Embassy bombing trials that we had intercepted bin Laden's satellite phone resulted in his no longer using it. If this had not been disclosed at trial, we may have picked up information that could have stopped 9-11. It is one of the fundamental flaws of the lawfare model for dealing with terrorism.