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White House under pressure over Guantanamo ruling |
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Tuesday, 05 June 2007 |
The Bush administration faced pressure on Tuesday to overhaul how
it brings foreign terrorism suspects to trial after the surprise dismissal of
war crimes charges against two prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
With only days to appeal, the White House said it disagreed with the separate
rulings by U.S. military judges on Monday and denied it had suffered another
setback after being forced by the Supreme Court to change the system just last
year.
Advocates for the detainees hailed the decisions as a watershed that would
unleash legal challenges to the 2006 U.S. law that established the current
military tribunal system.
The rulings do not affect U.S. authority to indefinitely hold about 380 foreign
suspects at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeast Cuba, a source of
criticism over how the United States is prosecuting the war on terror.
But advocates and lawmakers in Congress said it was time to restore the rights
of the prisoners to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, which Congress
revoked last year.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
called on the White House to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to
craft a new legal framework for the tribunals.
"The place to start is by restoring the hallmark of justice known as the great
writ of habeas corpus," Leahy said.
Judges in the U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo dropped all charges
against the only two captives facing trial, rulings that could preclude trying
any of the 380 prisoners any time soon.
The judges said they lacked jurisdiction under the strict definition of those
subject to trial under a law the U.S. Congress drafted last year.
The charges did not affect U.S. authority to hold foreign prisoners at the
Guantanamo detention and interrogation camp in southeast Cuba.
But it was the latest setback for the Bush administration's efforts to put the
Guantanamo detainees through some form of judicial process. It was forced to
rewrite the rules last year after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the old
tribunals illegal.
Charges were dropped for Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured in a firefight in
Afghanistan at age 15. He was accused of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade
and wounding another in a battle at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan
in 2002.
Charges were also dropped against Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, who is accused of
driving and guarding Osama bin Laden. Hamdan last year won a U.S. Supreme Court
challenge that scrapped the first Guantanamo tribunal system.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the rulings showed "a certain amount of
judicial independence" while reiterating the Defense Department's conviction
that the two detainees were eligible for trial.
But Zachary Katznelson of the British-based legal charity, Reprieve, which
represents 37 detainees at Guantanamo, said his group would push for the Supreme
Court to examine the Military Commission Act of 2006 that created the new
system.
"It shows they can't even get the show trials right," Katznelson told Reuters in
a telephone interview.
Jumana Musa of Amnesty International, who attended Monday's proceedings as an
observer, said the rulings amounted to an indictment of U.S. policy on
detainees.
But some analysts said no new congressional action was necessary because
Monday's rulings only required Defense Secretary Robert Gates to make
administrative changes to allow the detainees to be designated as "unlawful
enemy combatants."
"Some appear to be overreacting to what the judges held," said Scott Silliman of
Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security.
Many military lawyers have argued for years that the United States should scrap
the tribunals and conduct the trials in the court-martial system, where the
rules are clear and legal landmarks are long-established.
"The military judges are capable of doing good work if we go back to the system
that's tried and true, the court-martial," said Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy
Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift.
"The government should have seen that argument coming a long way away," Swift
said. "That shows what happens when you throw together legislation, throwing out
all the past precedents and try to get it done quick and dirty."
The judges in the Hamdan and Khadr cases said they lacked jurisdiction because
the defendants were classified as "enemy combatants" rather than "unlawful enemy
combatants," as required by the system set in place by Congress.
The judges gave the Bush administration 72 hours to decide on an appeal. But the
court authorized to hear appeals under the new system has yet to be created,
said the chief defense counsel for the tribunals, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.
"We don't agree with the ruling," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told
reporters in Prague, where President George W. Bush was meeting with leaders of
the Czech Republic.
"In no way does this decision affect the appropriateness of the military
commission system."
Comments posted are the sole opinion of the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of AIM. |
