Free kibbles

First Guantanamo trial, for Osama bin Laden's driver, to being Monday. It's ridiculous how Congress and the Courts have delayed this. This article lists a few of the precedents for military tribunals in US history and mentions how the process has been sabotaged for these tribunals.

Military commissions have been used throughout US history. George Washington used them during the Revolution. Abraham Lincoln authorized them during the Civil War. And those accused of plotting President Lincoln's assassination were tried by a military commission.

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt put a group of would-be German saboteurs on trial by secret military commission in Washington. The action was upheld by the US Supreme Court and provided a model for the Bush Administration.

But the Guantánamo commission process ran into trouble. It became a lightning rod for international criticism of the administration's controversial legal approach to the war on terror. President Bush's original commission procedures were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005, and on June 12 the high court invalidated a substantial portion of a new legal regime created at Guantánamo by Congress and the White House in 2006.

xxx