November 9, 2004 in Nation/World

Guantanamo military trials illegal, judge rules

• Print
• Email
• Share

The Spokesman-Review photo

Hamdan
(Full-size photo)

WASHINGTON – Special trials established to determine the guilt or innocence of prisoners at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are unlawful and cannot continue in their current form, a federal judge ruled Monday.

In a setback for the Bush administration, U.S. District Judge James Robertson found that detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and therefore entitled to the protection of international and military law, which the U.S. government has refused to grant them.

The decision, which came in a lawsuit filed by the first alleged al Qaeda member facing trial before what the U.S. government calls “military commissions,” upends – at least for now – the administration’s strategy for prosecuting hundreds of alleged al Qaeda and Taliban detainees accused of terrorist crimes.

The government has faced steady criticism from human rights advocates, foreign governments and the detainees’ lawyers that the rules governing military commissions are stacked unfairly against the defendants. But Monday’s ruling is the first by a federal judge that the commissions, which took nearly two years to get under way, are invalid.

The Bush administration blasted the ruling as wrongly giving special rights to terrorists and announced it would ask a higher court for an emergency stay and reversal of Robertson’s decision. Military officers at Guantanamo immediately halted commission proceedings due to the ruling.

“We vigorously disagree. … (T)he Judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war,” said Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo. “The Constitution entrusts to the president the responsibility to safeguard the nation’s security. The Department of Justice will continue to defend the president’s ability and authority under the Constitution to fulfill that duty.”

Robertson determined that the military commissions, which the president authorized the Pentagon to revive after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are neither lawful nor proper. Under commission rules, the government could, for example, exclude people accused of terrorist acts from some commission sessions and deny them access to evidence, which the judge said violated basic military law.

Robertson ruled that the government should have held special hearings for detainees to determine whether they qualified for prisoner of war protections when they were first captured, as required by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the administration declared the captives “enemy combatants” and decided to afford them some, but not all, of the protections spelled out by the Geneva accords.

Robertson ordered that until the government provides the hearing, it can only prosecute the detainees in courts-martial, under long-established military law.

Robertson issued his decision in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a detainee captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and accused of being a member of al Qaeda. His opinion is expected to set the standard for treatment of other detainees before military commissions. So far, only four Guantanamo Bay detainees have been ordered to stand trial.

The unusual coalition of defense attorneys and conservative military law experts who banded together to challenge the commissions Monday hailed the decision as a major victory in efforts to level the playing field for the detainees, some of whom have been held for nearly three years.

“We are thrilled by this ruling,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based group that represents the families of some Guantanamo Bay prisoners. “Military commissions were a bad idea and an embarrassment. The refusal of the Bush administration to apply the Geneva Conventions was a legal and moral outrage.”

Kevin Barry, a retired Coast Guard judge who is critical of the Pentagon’s legal justifications for the Guantanamo Bay detentions, called Robertson’s ruling a “remarkable” decision that “will give heart to all who think the rule of law should apply in the Afghanistan conflict.” Barry said the current war on terrorism is the first U.S. war since the Geneva Conventions’ adoption in 1949 in which the government has not accorded POW status to enemy fighters.

No comments on this story so far. Add yours!