Statement of the Chief Prosecutor on Last Week's Hearing in Al-Nashiri

In my remarks two weeks ago, I highlighted one woman’s bewilderment at how the open military commission trial encompassing the attack that killed her brother was being portrayed by certain private advocacy groups and members of the media as overly secretive. Today, I want to highlight related feelings of frustration and anger conveyed to me a few days ago by another surviving family member whose beloved brother died in a terror attack. In this most recent instance, the family member—also a longtime observer of commission proceedings—told me of her dismay at how the usual critics of military commissions have once again resorted to labeling them “a legal farce” and to describing the courtroom process as in “chaos,” or as having been “derailed.” It is important to emphasize that her dismay was not directed at the military commission process, whatever the real or imagined shortcomings claimed by its detractors. She knows for herself that the military commissions system is the only national security and justice institution that can lawfully try those charged in her brother’s death. She appreciates that the accused are securely and humanely detained while facing charges at Guantanamo, even as these drawn-out capital proceedings sorely test her patience and that of other victims. She understands also that the accused are presumed innocent, and that the charges are only allegations unless and until proved guilty under law, a standard fundamental to our values. And she sees cruel irony in the position of those few but vocal and stubborn holdouts who apparently would prefer to restart yet again from the beginning in a civilian court, where they unselfconsciously presume there would be a swift march toward a guilty verdict, notwithstanding the presence of legal and practical issues that no genuine forum of justice, civilian or military, could sidestep. Her dismay, rather, was at what she feels is a thinly disguised eagerness in some to generate spectacle out of the pre-trial phase, which is always methodical but can appear intermittent—almost as if lampooning these proceedings were a sport. I admit that I couldn’t fully comfort her on this point, even as I explained the steady but unsensational progress being made, much of it out of court; offered my assessment that our government continues to commit the resources and personnel necessary to seeing the military commissions underway through to trial; and pledged that none of us assigned to this mission would fail to complete our share of the task, however long that takes. I advised that time would expose those whose opinions torment her to be unburdened by fact, dismissive of evidence undercutting their positions, and contradicted by the readily available public record of trial.