The United States of America does not do show-trials.

I don’t know how many times I must have written and said those words during the debates over the use of waterboarding as an interrogation tactic. It is, I believe, one of the bright lines that separate us from the loathsome regimes to which the Left cavalierly compares us — the Soviets and their Gulag, the North Vietnamese who tortured John McCain and his brethren, Saddam’s Iraq, Iran’s mullahs, and history’s remaining roll call of sadists.

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The tired torture debate? Waterboarding: Is it or isn’t it? Forget it. That’s not the point now. The point is: When the United States has used harsh tactics that creep close to the elusive line of torture, the purpose has been to gather intelligence, to save lives. It was not to coerce confessions for use at trial. Confessions obtained by such methods have no place in a trial. Period.

Indeed, the administration has argued, again and again, that rough tactics have not been systematically used. That implies (one hopes) that the tactics have been rarely used and only against high-value detainees whom we had reason to suspect were aware of ongoing mass-murder plots. The question whether we should ever use such tactics provokes vigorous debate. The question of who might be subjected to such tactics should not: We are talking only about terrorists we already know are terrorists. They should never be used in order to prove that someone is a terrorist.

These bright lines, it seems, have blurred, at least for some wayward officials. That could produce the death knell of the military-commission system — ironically, at the very moment when, despite the slanders it has endured for seven years, military justice has lived up to its honorable traditions.

THE APPOINTING AUTHORITY
About a week ago, a military judge disqualified a top officer in the defense department’s “Appointing Authority” (sometimes called the “Convening Authority”) — the body designated by the president and the secretary of defense to oversee military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. The ruling was issued in the case of Salim Hamdan.

Hamdan, once a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is the combatant whose referral for a military-commission trial became grist for the Supreme Court’s controversial 2006 Hamdan decision and, subsequently, the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA), by which Congress endorsed military trials.

The Appointing Authority is the foundation on which the commission-project rests. Much like a grand jury (the body designed to protect citizens from sham cases brought by overzealous civilian prosecutors), it determines which cases proposed by prosecutors have sufficient merit to be referred for commission trials. It appoints the military judges who preside over commissions. It allocates resources not only to the prosecution but to military defense counsel, so the latter can carry out their sworn duty to “defend the Accused zealously within the bounds of the law without regard to personal opinion as to the guilt of the Accused.”

In executing these responsibilities, the Appointing Authority must be above reproach. It is no easy thing. The conduct of war is a political exercise. The performance of what is essentially a judicial task, ensuring justice for those making war on us, sits uneasily with the imperative of defeating our enemies. But we ask our military to do many things that are not easy. If this particular task is botched, the system will lack integrity. Its outcomes will be derided as those of a kangaroo court. The war effort, dependent on support from the American people and our allies, will be wounded.

There have been a slew of frivolous, overheated, and downright libelous complaints about Gitmo. This is not one of them. The forceful criticism of military tribunals — voiced by not only knee-jerk human-rights activists but national-security experts whose priority is defeating radical Islam — is that they are an almost exclusively executive-branch production. To be sure, they are not without a meaningful judicial check, but that check is severely restricted in time.

While this critique has persuasive force, it should not carry the day (emphasis on should not). Our enemies are not entitled to more than the limited protections that have been prescribed for commissions. Those limited protections, though, must be extended in good faith. They can’t be a sham. In a non-judicial system, that means the Appointing Authority must be an honest broker.