With Military Tribunals for All?: The Case of Salim Hamdan

Abstract

On 13 November 2001, two short months after the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush issued a military order authorizing the use of military tribunals to try certain noncitizen terror suspects.¹ Former White House legal strategist John Yoo described the president’s order as the “most practical, yet least successful antiterrorism initiative.”² Despite the fact that the use of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists was supported by a majority of the public at the time,³ criticism of the president’s order poured in from all quarters.⁴ As a result, we are more than six years removed from the creation of the tribunals, and they have produced only one negotiated guilty plea, that of Australian David Hicks, an individual more frequently described as a “soldier-of-fortune wannabe” than a dangerous terrorist.⁵ No full tribunal hearings have been completed.