The military commissions are not a military court. The military courts in this country are the courts martial and the applicable law is the UCMJ. Under customary IHL, they should be tried in the same courts that the people they attacked would be. Under the Geneva Conventions, they have the right not to testify against themselves, and to confront the witnesses against them, among other things, and -- they have the right to a new hearing on their detention status in front of a regularly constituted court first. And those rights have to mean what they mean for any other defendant in the U.S. That's what it means to be tried in a regularly constituted court.

The reply was intended to be at least a little tongue-in-cheek.

Still wondering...if anyone thinks KSM is fit to stand trial.

There are actually two issues, whether he is fit to stand trial, and what, if any, evidence is admissible if it is taken after torture. On the former, don't expect the issue to be resolved in anything resembling a fair process in the SDNY, if Aafia Siddiqui's competency hearing is any indication.

On the latter, the question that has to be resolved is whether or not the information obtained would have been obtained, or would have been the same, if the defendant had not been tortured. Again, don't expect it to come up that way. The FBI has been doing backfilling interrogations at Guantánamo, that are tantamount to justifying torture testimony, since the MCA was passed. Expect to see it submitted as legal evidence the same way interrogations by the FBI done deliberately outside the country to avoid Miranda, or interrogations done by the FBI where the prisoner is under duress outside the country submitted as lawful.

As a resident of the rest of the country, I think far too much tax money has already been spent focussing on the lunatics in your city and the damage they have done to the rest of the world. Your safety from the rest of the world is probably easier to arrange than the rest of the world's safety from you.

Does US military have exclusive jurisdiction at US bases?

Depends on what you mean by "exclusive" but yes, the military has jurisdiction for military personnel at military bases.

BTW to others: As has been pointed out, wgsalter's repetition of the frequently stated spy-may-be-shot-on-the-spot line is untrue, and has been since 1951, when the 4th Geneva Convention went into effect. The statement by rrheard that the Geneva Conventions apply when the U.S. Congress declares war is also untrue: in undeclared armed conflicts the laws of war apply, and in declared wars in which there has been no armed conflict, they do not. The operative is the existence of a recognized armed conflict, not the existence of a declaration of any sort.

Personally, I think that now that the military commissions will get used for a trial that doesn't end the way the Salim Hamdan one did, the MCA may get challenged. I am quite sure it could be argued that they violate the Geneva Conventions rules for a war crimes tribunal, the same way the CSRTs and the military tribunals were judged to not be valid venues for a habeas corpus hearing. That, of course, does not make a good reason for resorting to them. Congress could end this by repealing that law.

I think the decision by Eric Holder, and the already building fight that will ensue, and did ensue before when President Obama announced an intention to close Guantánamo, is a clear indication that the society is suffering from more than the corruption of endless war. There are three types of torture corruption that Darius Rejali speaks of for democracies, all three got practiced, and all three problems result from the conservative agenda over the years since the Vietnam War and the Miranda and school prayer decisions.

There is the need for total safety (produces interrogation torture), which is the corruption that I think equates to Glenn's corruption from endless war. There is the need for retribution and the dismissal of circumstantial evidence or anything in the courtroom that might be exculpating (pressures which cause confession torture), and there is the need to define our "moral values" as a superior society coming from the religious right (pressure which causes mass or administrative torture). We will see all three clearly before the prisoners issue gets resolved properly.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/share.html?s=news01s34DDqC90

Amnesty International (US) lawyer Rafia Zakaria has a piece in Dawn about the Petra Bartosiewicz article The Intelligence Factory, about the prisoner Aafia Siddiqui.

Here's the Zakaria piece,

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-Losing-the-moral-war-qs-06

Here's Petra Bartosiewicz's piece,

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082719

Rafia Zakaria puts the number of disappeared involved with the U.S. counter-terror at 1,100 with 400 under investigation. Note that there are about 4,000 others which are purely Pakistani cases, having to do with the Baloch insurgency.