By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog.

Guantánamo is in total disarray.
Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military
Commissions in Guantánamo -- the unique system of trials for "terror
suspects" that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice
President Dick Cheney and his close advisers -- will be aware that their
progress has been faltering at best. After six and a half years, in which they
have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, derailed by their own military
judges, relentlessly savaged by their own military defense lawyers, and
condemned as politically motivated by their own former chief prosecutor, they
have only secured one contentious result: a plea bargain negotiated by the
Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing "material support for
terrorism," and dropped his well-chronicled claims of torture and abuse by
US forces, in order to secure his return to Australia to serve out the
remainder of a meager nine-month sentence last March.
In the last few weeks, however, Cheney's dream has been souring at an even
more alarming rate than usual. Following boycotts of pre-trial hearings
in March and April by three prisoners -- Mohamed Jawad, Ahmed al-Darbi and
Ibrahim al-Qosi -- the latest appearance by Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked
as a driver for Osama bin Laden, spread the words "boycott" and
"Guantánamo" around the world.
Hamdan is no ordinary Guantánamo prisoner. It was his case, Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld, that shut down the Military Commissions' first incarnation in
June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, a decision that
forced the administration to press new legislation -- the Military Commissions
Act -- through a sleeping Congress later that year.
But Hamdan's fame meant little to him on April 29, when he too decided to
boycott his trial, telling Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the judge in his last
pre-trial hearing before his trial is scheduled to begin, "The law is
clear. The Constitution is clear. International law is clear. Why don't we
follow the law? Where is the justice?"
For his part, Capt. Allred did not give up without attempting to persuade
Hamdan that he should believe in the legal process before which he found
himself. "You should have great faith in the law," he said. "You
won. Your name is all over the law books." This was true, but it was
little consolation for Hamdan, who was charged again as soon as the Commissions
were revived in Congress. Nor could Capt. Allred's addendum -- "You even
won the very first time you came before me" -- sway him, even though that
too was true.
Last June, when Hamdan appeared before Capt. Allred for the first time, in
the first pre-trial hearing for his new Military Commission, Allred dismissed the case, pointing out that the Military Commissions Act, which had revived the
Commissions, applied only to "unlawful enemy combatants," whereas
Hamdan, and every other prisoner in Guantánamo for that matter, had only been
determined to be "enemy combatants" in the tribunals -- the Combatant
Status Review Tribunals -- that had made them eligible for trial by Military
Commission.
It was small wonder that Hamdan was despondent, however. Two months later,
an appeals court reversed Allred's decision, and Hamdan -- twice a victor -- was charged once more, and
removed from a privileged position in Guantánamo's Camp IV -- reserved for a
few dozen compliant prisoners who live communally -- to Camp VI, where, like
the majority of the prisoners, he has spent most of his time in conditions that
amount to solitary confinement, and where, as his lawyers pointed out in February, his
mental health has deteriorated significantly.
As he prepared to boycott proceedings, Hamdan had a few last questions for
Capt. Allred. He asked the judge why the government had changed the law --
"Is it just for my case?" -- and responded to Allred's insistence
that he would do everything he could to give him a fair trial by asking,
"By what law will you try me?" When Allred replied that he would be
tried under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan gave up.
"But the government changed the law to its advantage," he said.
"I am not being tried by the American law."
Col. Morris Davis condemns the Commissions (again)
Hamdan's eloquent and restrained explanation for his boycott was the most
poignant event in his hearing, but it was not the most explosive. That accolade
was reserved for Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the
Commissions, who resigned noisily last October, citing political interference in the process. Once the
Commissions' stoutest supporter -- in 2006 he told reporters, "Remember if
you dragged Dracula out into the sunlight he melted? Well, that's kind of the
way it is trying to drag a detainee into the courtroom" -- Col. Davis
explained his Damascene conversion in an
op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in December. [more]