This is Complete and Total Contempt for the Law and Civil Rights

Not only was the FBI spying on the defense counsel at the kangaroo courts military tribunals at Guantánamo, they actually flipped a member of the defense team with access to all their documents into an informant:

The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.

Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.

Defense attorneys argued the government plunged them into a potential conflict of interest, as they would need to potentially defend themselves against a leak investigation, risking their ability to put their clients’ legal needs ahead of their own.

They implored Pohl to investigate, and if necessary, assign their clients with new independent counsel to advise the defendants about the existence and implications of conflict of interest. That could be a lengthy process – potentially the next delay for a proceeding that has yet to get out of the pretrial stage nearly two years after the latest incarnation of the 9/11 military trials began.

“We have an impossible situation in terms of representing our client … on any issue,” said James Harrington, a civilian attorney for Mohammed’s co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the case, which carries the death penalty.

………

On 6 April two FBI agents approached the defense security officer assigned to bin al-Shibh’s defense team with a document that “in essence, seeks to enlist defense personnel” in an inquiry into the manifesto leak, said Walter Ruiz, an attorney for co-defendant Mustafa Ahmed al-Hasawi.

Harrington said the unnamed security officer, a contractor for the firm SRA International, had signed the document, which was written to indicate the start of an “ongoing” relationship with the bureau.

A defense security officer is a non-lawyer assigned by the commission’s convening authority to advise the defense team on the handling of classified information, among other issues. The officer would have had “unlimited access to our files,” Harrington said, although not to those of the other legal teams.

The presiding officer has adjourned hearings to determine who else might have been turned into a government agent. Of note is that even though the prosecution denies knowledge of any FBI investigation, "Joanna Baltes, an absent member of the prosecution team who recently became chief of staff to FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, played a role in the FBI involvement." (emphasis mine)

Yea, sure, no collusion between the FBI and the Prosecutors at Guantánamo.  None at all. (Not)

On every single level, the military commissions have been a failure.

It was created to generate guaranteed convictions, and in so doing it eschewed the hundreds of years of developments that created the modern Unified Code of Military Justice, and the nearly 800 years of development of legal process that began with the Magna Carta.

These proceedings are an embarrassment to the nation which diminishes our stature throughout the world while serving as a highly effective recruiting tool for extremists,