Subject: Kangaroo Court: It seems oddly appropriate that the first person brought before the Guantanamo kangaroo court is from Australia David Hicks. Ken K

RESPONSE: The bill that Bush pushed through Congress to allow this phony Court system to try so called enemy combatants appears as almost a mirror image of Hitler's 1933 Enabling Act. To allow testimony coerced via torture and to allow hearsay evidence is counter to all the precepts of our Constitution and our Law and as you note these show trials are properly seen throughout the world as lacking any credence of judicial fairness...as a kangaroo court.

They seem more like what one would expect from dictatorships of Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe or other tin pot dictatorial ruled entities and should embarrass us all. We have become under Bush Republicans a Fascist State. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to recognize that these Military Commission trials held outside of America at Guantanamo lack any kind of legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.

The irony of your comments regarding the conviction of Australian David Hicks who worked at one time skinning kangaroos. In testimony to Congress, Gates repeated an earlier leaked recommendation to close the five-year-old detention centre and move the hard core inmates among its nearly 400 captives to the US. He wanted to get military commission trials moved to the US because, as he pointed out, "I felt that no matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials, if they took place at Guantanamo, in the international community they would lack credibility." Gates said that trials of suspects at Guantanamo Bay lacked international credibility because of the taint of past treatment of detainees.
With the law that set up these commission kangaroo trials, Congress stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to get involved in cases involving detainees. Lawyers for many detainees challenged the law but a federal appeals court upheld it. The Supreme Court has not said whether it will take the case.

The New York Times stated that the legislation introduced, "A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted." Calling the bill "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts," the Times goes on to highlight the rubber stamping of torture. "Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses."