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Inside the Guantánamo terror trials

A rare insight into a so-called trial at Gitmo - as published on Salon:

"As a former federal defender, I've been to countless court hearings, but Wednesday was the first time I had to take a speedboat, equipped with two M2 50-caliber machine guns, to get to court. That's because Wednesday was also my first experience with the military commissions at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, where the U.S. government is putting 15 terror suspects on trial.

The first hearing was an arraignment of Mohammad Kamin, a thin, frail Afghan, estimated to be about 30 years old, whom the United States accuses of providing material support for terrorism by receiving arms training at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan for several months in 2003.

Although Kamin was apprehended five years ago, he was not charged with a crime until March 2008. Wednesday was his first judicial hearing.

It was also the first time the judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, presided over a military commission, and the first time for both the prosecutor, Maj. Omar Ashmawy, and the military defense counsel, Lt. Richard Federico, to appear at one."

Read on here. There can be no other words for it - the US has abandoned any sense of decency, humanity, let alone any semblance of justice, in what it is perpetrating in relation to renditioning, prisoners held without trial, Gitmo and the upcoming so-called "trials".

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