In a democracy, isn't a judge suppose to be in control of his court? During the Moscow Trials, when Stalin worked to eliminate his competition, he would sit in a secret cabin and observe the trial. Eventually, some of the most prominent men in the founding of the USSR were eliminated. Imagine if all the founding fathers of the United States had been executed 20 years after the war of independence for conspiring to return America to the king of Britain.
The similarities between the Moscow Trials and the current Guantanamo trials are too long to list, but the most damning one of them is the use of torture. At the mere mention of the CIA torture sites -- or "Black Sites" as they are more happily called -- the audio feed to the trial was cut off. Judge Pohl was slightly displeased at the mysterious, unnanounced interruption of the audio feed. A court officer is the one who is supposed to be in control of the audio feed, but he was not the one who turned off the audio.
Judge Pohl promised that he would have a talk with whatever powers-that-be had hijacked his court without his knowledge. However, I'm sure that censored trials will be the new main course of action in the Land of the Free. Afterall, how can we remain free if the world learns of our Black Sites? Freedom means we have to sacrifice, and in this case we're sacrificing merely minutes from a trial.
