The Bush administration said at the time that the circumstances surrounding the attacks on New York and

The Bush administration said at the time that the circumstances surrounding the attacks on New York and Washington were so unique that suspects could not be tried in normal courts without serious damage to national security.The last US tribunals were held to try eight German saboteurs, captured in New York and Chicago in 1942. Six of them were executed, one was sentenced to life and the other to 30 years. A fair system of justice provides an opportunity for trial mistakes to be corrected through independent review.”The tribunals were ordered by President Bush in November, 2001, as a way of prosecuting alleged al-Qa’ida and Taliban fighters captured during the war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks. “Under these rules, the military serves as prosecutor, judge, jury, appeals court and, potentially, even as executioner The commission rules do not create a level playing field. The military commissions offer no possibility for independent appeal, no matter how serious the error. Two years passed before it was recovered hidden in the bottom of a suitcase in a hotel room in Florence.

The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, a former employee at the Louvre, had smuggled it out under his smock, claiming he wanted to repatriate the painting to Italy.. His mother was so furious with him she threw his hoard of 60 paintings – worth £1.2bn – into a canal.GREAT ROBBERIESDrumlanrig Castle, Dumfries-shire, 2003In August last year, two cool-headed thieves joined a tour of Drumlanrig Castle, overpowered their guide and escaped through a kitchen window with Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece Madonna with the Yardwinder, valued at £30m. Tomorrow for the first time since the Second World War, America will start a series of military tribunals to prosecute four of the 600 prisoners it is holding at Guantanamo Bay.
The US insists the tribunals will be fair, and are the appropriate way to deal with prisoners that President George Bush described as “killers” and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft called “uniquely dangerous”.But human rights groups and legal campaigners have condemned the hearings as unprecedentedly unfair and in contravention not just of the Geneva Conventions but a raft of other international laws.”We’re concerned that the military commission rules lack key fair-trial protections,” said Wendy Patten, a director of Human Rights Watch, based in New York. None of the paintings has been recovered.Mona Lisa, The Louvre, 1911The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, a theft so audacious that it was not noticed missing until the following day. The intruders escaped with a Manet, three Rembrandts, several sketches by Degas and Vermeer’s The Concert, above, a haul estimated at £300m.

Despite CCTV footage of the theft, below, and photographs a tourist took of the getaway, neither the thieves nor the painting have been found.Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, Boston 1990Late on St Patrick’s night 1990, two men dressed as police knocked on the door of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, saying they were investigating reports of a disturbance. The guards let them in and the thieves pounced, tying and gagging the guards. He got the painting back.Mr Radcliffe says most thieves will take anything. In one case, a Swiss man, Stephane Breitwesier, was arrested in 2002. A painting may lie low for a years before being reintroduced into the market. Lesser known works are sometimes “surfaced” at auction and described as a version of the original.But less orthodox methods were used by the Marquess of Bath, who placed an advert in Exchange & Mart and hired a convicted art thief to recover Titian’s Rest on the Flight to Venus, left, after it was stolen from his home at Longleat in 1995. Many of them enter the criminal underworld, never to be seen again.But of the hundreds of works stolen every year, a few miraculously reappear, with no one arrested and no questions asked.