Guantanamo tribunals to begin
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – When the Pentagon opens its first military commissions here Tuesday, two men captured in Afghanistan will become the first to face a war crimes court set up by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks.
One is David Hicks, 29, an Australian ranch hand and Christian convert to radical Islam who ran away from home and fought in Kosovo. The other is Salim Hamdan, 34, a wiry Yemeni who worked as a driver and sometime bodyguard on Osama bin Laden’s Kandahar, Afghanistan, farm.
Each is charged with conspiracy as alleged al Qaeda members. But neither is directly linked to the 2001 terrorist attacks that spawned the new system of U.S. justice that is still a work in progress – criticized by international law experts, protested by military defense lawyers and making its debut through motions that will set the stage for eventual trials.
And neither defendant is cast as a top-level al Qaeda operative. Rather, the two are cast as functionaries, foot soldiers swept up like the hundreds of their fellow captives from 42 countries held in the controversial prison.
“There are really two purposes to hold military tribunals: One is legitimate, to hold people who have committed war crimes in the context of a military conflict,” said Georgetown law Professor David Cole, who has criticized what he perceives as the lack of due process in the U.S. experiment in holding and interrogating captives in a U.S.-controlled slice of Cuba.
“The other purpose, which is also traditional, but less legitimate, is to function as a show trial. In many respects that is what the administration is seeking to do with these cases,” Cole added. “It’s not a process to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. They have chosen to hand-select a couple of cases in which they have strong evidence and have a kind of show trial to legitimize what they have been doing at Guantanamo.”
The Pentagon has paraded the media and Congress members around the prison camp in choreographed tours designed to show conditions as humane. The International Red Cross was the only human rights group permitted access.
But, after photographs of American soldiers humiliating prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison sparked a scandal, the Pentagon decided to permit independent observers of the trials. Delegates from the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, among others, have been given gallery seats at the opening sessions of the proceedings against Hicks and Hamdan.
Two other prisoners have likewise been charged with conspiracy: Yemeni Ali Hamza Bahlul and Sudanese Ibrahim al Qosi. But delays are expected in those cases. Bahlul has yet to receive a military-approved translator, and Qosi’s defense lawyer has quit after reassignment as an Air Force judge.
A five-member panel of colonels will act as judge and jury at the eventual trials. Only the presiding officer, former Army judge Col. Peter Brownback, has legal experience.