Giving Starbucks coffee to prisoners is no substitute for a clean trial.
by Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Timing is everything. Yesterday the Pentagon announced that it will seek the death penalty against six men accused of masterminding the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Arriving at the heels of CIA Director Michael Hayden’s admission last week that three detainees at Gitmo — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is among the defendants — were waterboarded, the announcement sparked immediate questions about the viability of the evidence against the defendants, who are said to have undergone other forms of “harsh interrogation.” As one reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino: “Is the White House at all concerned that some of the evidence of the confessions by many of these men may not be admissible because they were obtained through waterboarding, which the administration admitted to last week?”
Perino skirted the question, but I would guess ‘no.’ That’s because the Pentagon has deployed a novel strategy to legitimize the process and make it respectable again: take defendants imprisoned in an endless legal limbo and whose confessions have been tortured out of them and interrogate them again, this time asking nicely and without violence, to obtain the same evidence. A few months later, voila: You have a clean trial.