Convictions: Slate's blog on legal issues

The Terror Tribunals, To Be Continued

Ben, you posed great questions the other day about the 9/11 plotters, their culpability and appropriate punishment, the due process that the military tribunals set up to try them could deliver, and, especially, what "real due process" would look like for them. For me the answers to the first two questions are tied up in each other. Because of my doubts about the procedural protections to be afforded KSM et al, in particular the influence of torture testimony on  their trials (whether or not it's directly admitted), I don't think they should be executed, despite their culpability. I just don't want this country to be a place where people are sentenced to die based on a prosecution that is tainted by torture testimony.

There are a lot of hard questions that this sliver of certainty doesn't address: What's supposed to happen to these detainees, then, and your crucial question, what due process should they get? I'm only beginning to stumble toward my own answers. I know you've thought a lot more about this than I have, thanks to the impressive-looking advance copy of your new book, Law and the Long War, that is sitting on my desk. We probably come out in different places on various points, but I'd love to hear your thoughts whenever you think the time is right. (And everyone else's, too, of course.)