KSM Military Commission Arraignment Tomorrow

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow along with four others in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay. We covered the Convening Authority's referral of terrorism charges here (with a link to the charge sheets).

The proceedings will be telecast live at the Post Theater at Fort Meade, Maryland; more information is here and here. Wells Bennett and Benjamin Wittes will live-blog on the proceedings at Lawfare.

Chief Prosecutor General Mark Martins told Charlie Savage at the NYT that he's optimistic that the trial will be fair. Benjamin Wittes (Brookings, Lawfare) similarly wrote in yesterday's WaPo that the commission hearings are "nothing like the kangaroo court of human rights groups' caricatures," and that they have "[q]uietly and gradually . . . become a real court."

But military defense attorneys interviewed in Savage's piece don't share this optimism. Savage writes that they say "improvements are exaggerated," and that they intend to ask presiding Judge Colonel James Pohl "to send the capital charges back to the Pentagon for reconsideration because of problems that, they say, have crippled their ability to provide a meaningful defense."

SDS