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May 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 
It is a year since America successfully concluded its unfinished business with Osama bin Laden, delivering a measure of closure both to the US nation and to the friends and families of the 2,819 people who died on September 11 2001. Tomorrow morning, in a purpose-built hangar on the old airstrip in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the next stage of that process begins when Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in the attacks on the Twin Towers are arraigned for what is already being billed as the “trial of the century”.
But as the five men register their pleas in front of a specially designed military war crimes tribunal, it is already clear that it will not just be them on trial. Also in the dock will be the Obama administration, the US Congress, the CIA, the US military and, indeed, the very values of freedom and democracy that America has professed to defend in its decade-long “war on terror”.
Even before it starts, opponents of the process have dismissed the tribunal as a legal sham and “second-tier” justice: the kind of unconstitutional kangaroo court that if it were put on in China or North Korea would be dismissed as a “show trial” whose outcome – the execution of the accused – has been predetermined from the start.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed – or KSM, as he has become known – who bragged at a previous trial about decapitating the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is surely not a man who elicits sympathy; but his well-documented mistreatment amounting to torture in Guantánamo and several CIA “black” sites – he was waterboarded 183 times – has raised legitimate questions about whether he can get a fair trial from a US military court, with a jury of US military officers.
This will, in effect, be the third attempt at trying KSM. He was initially charged by a military tribunal that was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, then ordered to stand trial in a Federal Court in New York after the Obama administration announced it was closing Guantánamo Bay. He has now been returned to a “reformed” war crimes tribunal system after Congress effectively stopped the New York trial, believing it too dangerous and too likely to give KSM an opportunity to grandstand.
The man charged with answering all those awkward questions is the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, Brigadier-General Mark Martins, a 6ft 3in beanpole with unflinchingly upright bearing and a Roman nose. His face, almost unknown today, is soon to become indivisibly linked to the credibility, or otherwise, of the trials.
Martins is an intriguing hybrid: both a lawyer and a soldier. He is a battle-hardened commander who can bash out six-minute miles in the Afghan desert with his former boss and mentor Gen David Petraeus (now director of the CIA), but also holds a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) from Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1980s. At that time, Britain was in the midst of the upheaval of the miners’ strike and the war on football hooliganism, but he says he still learned to love all things British.
Sitting in his office outside Washington, a stone’s throw from CIA headquarters in Langley, Martins is under no illusions about the task that lies ahead as he talks to The Daily Telegraph. He must prosecute KSM and his co-conspirators while at the same time defend the “reformed” Guantánamo war crimes tribunals from attack by defense lawyers, constitutional experts, UN rapporteurs, sections of the media and international human rights groups, all of whom have poured scorn on a process they say is unconstitutional, over-secretive and fundamentally unfair.
This will be Martins’s last assignment; he has deliberately passed up promotion to avoid the appearance of using the trial for careerist opportunity. He intends to spend more time with the children whose upbringing he largely missed out on during a decade at war. He apologises if he’s a little bleary-eyed, but he explains he was out late last night at a dinner for his daughter at Princeton. He also has a son at West Point military academy where Martins Snr himself graduated top of his class. Questions as to what role, if any, a retired Mark Martins might have in a presidential bid by Gen Petraeus are politely ignored.
“The defence is going to tear down the system, but that’s their job,” he says, with a wave of a trial-advocate’s hand. “They’re trying to get the best for their client. If attacking their system will do that, that’s what they’ll do. I don’t bemoan that – in fact, I celebrate it. That adversarial testing is what is going to give this legitimacy.”
And that, before the trials begin, is Martins’s chief plea to all those who would pre-judge the trials – look, listen, observe (the trials are broadcast for media and victims’ families via CCTV link to eight sites in the eastern US) and only then make up your mind as to whether KSM and the others are getting a fair trial.
“It is not just a group of officers sitting down and deciding what is going to happen to a person,” he says, arguing that the Guantánamo proceedings are now a very different beast since they were reformed in 2009 to give the defendants a host of new trial rights. “It is a very regularised procedure with rules against self-incrimination, choice of counsel, rules of evidence, ex post facto laws, rules against double jeopardy and the right to appeal.”
Martins’s mission to show the watching world that the trials are legitimate has not been helped by the fact that one of his predecessors as chief prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis, resigned from his post in protest in 2008. Earlier this year, Davis described the new trials process as the equivalent of putting “lipstick on a pig”, or as he told one interviewer, “a politically motivated veneer slapped on to the old process to give the administration an excuse for embracing what it had condemned”.
Not surprisingly, Martins doesn’t see it this way. His own record in clearing up the detention system in Bagram, Afghanistan – once known as the “Guantánamo of the East” – and introducing military-backed justice in Afghanistan, points, he says, to the fact that the military can be trusted to be “just”, and it has proved so in the past.
He rejects the notion that a US army officer who has been at war with al-Qaeda this past decade cannot be an impartial member of a jury that will be picked from a pre-determined selection of 230,000 serving officers. “An officer who served in Wardak province and had to deal with chaos and uncertainty and armed conflict is someone who I see is capable of doing justice, who will try to do what is fair and not convict someone unfairly,” he says.
Evidence extracted under torture will not be allowed, the use of hearsay will be restricted. “Mistreating somebody in detention is deplorable and disappointing, and the evidence that comes from that has no part in a criminal proceeding. But the remedy doesn’t involve just dropping charges. It is very rare that that’s the remedy. The remedy is usually to make that evidence inadmissible.”
This is the Martins way when asked difficult questions about Guantánamo: to measure the process strictly on the basis of whether it is following the rules and rubric laid out by Congress, rather than consider how it will appear to the outside world. Attacks like those from his predecessor are dismissed as trivial “name-calling”. Asked if a military judge, as in this case, can really be fair, and be seen to be fair, he has no doubt: “We have a saying: there may be no more independent individual in the world than a retirement-eligible Army colonel. These people are just independent people.
“There’s certainly been no allegations that these judges have been under the thumb. And you don’t see it in their rulings, and again, part of the transparency is: listen to them. Listen to Judge Pohl, I think it’s harder once you hear them, and you hear their reasoning. I think that’s one of the protections, too.
“A trial causes a society to go over something more slowly that events have caused people to go fast over,” he says. “It actually winds up structuring a debate in a way that can be quite helpful.”
The responsibility for whether the 9/11 trials do spark a debate that is “helpful”, or offer a reminder to the world of the worst excesses that followed the September 11 attacks and the failings of President Obama to “clean house” the way he promised he would, rests to a significant degree in the hands of Mark Martins.
It is a massive undertaking that, Martins says, goes to his “sense of honour”. As a soldier faced with a mission, Martins refuses to contemplate fear or failure, even as he acknowledges he will be a target for vilification. “I’ve been assigned this: it’s a duty. The soldiers in Paktika or Helmand don’t worry ultimately about how things might turn out. They are assigned their duty and do it the best they can,” he says.
As a scholar and a lawyer, he asks for a fair hearing from his critics, and hopes that they will become convinced that he is merely trying to “deliver justice”. “I feel that the things I learnt at Oxford really give you that gene, this idea of balance,” he says. “Stand in the other person’s shoes, do it honestly, and then come back around and see what part of your original thesis held, or didn’t.”
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