Guantanamo Bay Prisoner Trials Begin

Detainee’s Trial in Military System Begins Today

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2008; Page A03

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Nearly seven years after President Bush declared an “extraordinary emergency” that empowered him to bring terrorists before military judges, Osama bin Laden’s former driver is scheduled to go on trial Monday in the first test of whether that system can dispense fair and impartial justice.

“I find it ironic that there is this tremendous rush to unfairly discount a very well-thought-out military system,” said D. Hamilton Peterson, of Bethesda, whose father and stepmother were killed on the hijacked airplane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11. “Mr. Hamdan and these other suspects are getting more due process than any of the people who were beheaded by the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.”