Yesterday, WaPo noted an odd (to be kind) aspect of the Hicks case, which is that the plea bargain that was negotiated was done not, as plea deals normally are, between the defense and the prosecution–rather, it was negotiated between the presiding official and the defense without the prosecution’s knowledge (Australian’s Plea Deal Was Negotiated Without Prosecutors):

The plea deal that allows Australian David M. Hicks to leave the detention facility here with a nine-month sentence was negotiated between defense attorneys and the convening authority for military commissions without the knowledge of prosecutors, lawyers from both sides said.

The deal shows that the politically appointed authority has the power to personally decide the fate of America’s most notorious terrorism suspects.

[…]

As the deal developed in recent weeks, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor for military commissions, and his team on the Hicks case were not in the loop. Davis said he learned about the plea agreement Monday morning when the plea papers were presented to him, and he said the prosecution team was unaware that discussions had been taking place.

“We got it before lunchtime, before the first session,” Davis said at a news conference Friday night. In an interview later, he said the approved sentence of nine months shocked him. “I wasn’t considering anything that didn’t have two digits,” he said, referring to a sentence of at least 10 years.

It is strange, at a minimum, that the prosecution was looking at more than ten years for Hicks and yet the defense was able to get nine months plus time served out of the judge (so to speak).

The outcome isn’t just strange in a procedural sense, but there is a profound suggestion that politics substantially influenced the results. To wit:

Though Australian officials have said they were not directly involved in plea negotiations, Mori declined to answer questions about what, if any, influence they had. Australian Prime Minister John Howard, up for reelection this year, has been under public pressure to bring Hicks home. He turned to Vice President Cheney to implore that the case be resolved.

And, it just so happens that the presiding official who negotiated the plea deal with the defense has direct ties to the Vice President:

[Susan J.] Crawford was the Defense Department’s inspector general from 1989 to 1991, when Cheney was defense secretary.

As such, the following sarcasm appears to be rather warranted:

“What an amazing coincidence that, with an election in Australia by the end of the year, he gets nine months and he is gagged for 12 months from talking about it,” said Australian lawyer Lex Lasry, who was in Cuba to monitor the case over the past week.

So, the case that was supposed to be the “model” of justice under the military tribunals was almost certainly tainted by a political move. Even if one wants to go down the route that states that the administration is trying to help a key ally in the war on terror, the bottom line is that such manipulation of the process wholly undercuts its legitimacy and shows it to be nothing more than a farce.

One also has to wonder how this will affect the morale of the prosecutors in this system if they know that all their work can be undercut by a deal over which they have no influence and can be sprung on them at the last minute.