President-elect Barack Obama should implement “an unqualified return to America’s established system of justice for detaining and prosecuting suspects” when he fulfills his pledge to shut down the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and military commissions, four leading rights organizations said in a letter released today.

When alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants entered the Guantánamo Bay courtroom Monday, they came armed with a plan to martyr themselves at the hands of a tainted legal system. By the afternoon, the plan was in disarray.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others announced that they plan to plead guilty to conspiring in the September 11 attacks and related crimes at a hearing before US military commissions at Guantanamo today. All five defendants face the death penalty.

There was a ghost in the Guantanamo courtroom last month. The accused, Mohammed Kamin, was missing.

George W. Bush's term as president is coming to an end, and he has little to show by way of meting out justice for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Perhaps this is why his administration seems so desperate to score a victory on the judicial battleground of the military commissions. That its target is Omar Khadr, a child soldier at the time of the alleged offenses, makes the spectacle all the more pathetic to the observer, and tragic for Khadr.

When Army Lt. Col. Darrell Vandeveld began his work in May 2007 as a prosecutor at the Guantánamo Bay military commissions, the Iraq war veteran was one of the most enthusiastic and tenacious lawyers working on behalf of the Bush administration. So it came as a shock in mid-September when Vandeveld announced that he was resigning as a prosecutor because he had grave doubts about the integrity of the system he had so vigorously defended.

It was the second day of a round of pretrial hearings in the 9/11 case, and Ramzi Binalshibh, one of five accused al-Qaida operatives, was in an angry mood. He didn't seem upset about facing the death penalty; in a previous round of hearings he had declared that he would embrace martyrdom. What bothered him were his lawyers' efforts to save his life.

On August 21, 2008, Binyam Mohamed, a former UK resident detained at Guantanamo who is slated for trial before the military commissions, won the first stage in a battle for access to evidence showing he was tortured. The British government, which previously refused to turn over evidence that may back up Mohamed’s claims, was given one week by a UK court to reconsider its refusal, concluding that the information is essential for Mohamed to adequately defend himself. In a letter sent today, Human Rights Watch urges the British government to disclose to Mohamed’s lawyers any and all evidence it has about his interrogation and detention.