By J. Adam Abram, Board member, Human Rights First
On Wednesday, I attended a military commission hearing in the case of Noor Uthman Muhammed, a forty-something year old Sudanese man who is accused of being a member of al Qaeda. He has been in U.S. custody since March of 2002 and after eight years in custody at Bagram Air Force Base and Guantánamo, his trial is just getting underway in earnest and there has not been enough evidence presented to make a judgment about his guilt or innocence. There were three other nongovernmental organization observers at the trial, each of them an attorney. I am a businessman with a keen interest in civil liberties, not an attorney. I listened with great interest to my colleagues' expert analysis of the legal issues raised by the trial. But as a non-lawyer, I was focused on two elementary questions: Are the military commissions offering defendants a fair trial and are these proceedings in the best interest of the United States?
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