The Defense Department, responding to Supreme Court rulings, will create a panel of military officers to review whether prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being held legally and will notify them within 10 days of their right to contest their detention in U.S. courts, officials said Wednesday.
The moves, which human rights activists criticized as inadequate, followed last week’s Supreme Court decision that foreign terrorism suspects held at the base could turn to federal courts to challenge their confinements.
Separately, the Defense Department said President Bush had named nine more Guantanamo prisoners as eligible to be tried by a U.S. military tribunal, citing a “reason to believe” they were members of al-Qaida or were involved in terrorism against the United States. That brings to 15 the number of Guantanamo prisoners Bush has deemed eligible for such trials, which would be the first of their kind since World War II.
Rights groups have called Guantanamo a “legal black hole” where the United States holds prisoners indefinitely and with no legal representation. The United States has denied prisoner-of-war status to the prisoners that would entail a host of rights due under international treaties.
Officials of the Defense and Justice departments briefed reporters at the Pentagon on condition of anonymity on the Bush administration’s response to the June 28 Supreme Court ruling, as spelled out in a order from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Navy Secretary Gordon England.
New tribunal
The officials said prisoners would not be allowed legal representation for proceedings before a new Combatant Status Review Tribunal and said they did not know whether the hearings would be open to the public.
The officials said each of the roughly 595 prisoners held at Guantanamo would be notified by July 17 of their opportunity to contest before the newly created tribunal of three military officers his status as an “unlawful enemy combatant” — the classification given to them rather than POW. They also will be given notice of the basis for their detention, officials said.
In the same time frame, the prisoners will be told of their right to challenge the legality of their detention in U.S. courts, the officials said.
They added that a U.S. military officer would be assigned to each prisoner to assist in contesting his status as an enemy combatant, but they said the officer need not have legal training.
The officials said they believed those moves would satisfy the Supreme Court, seizing on part of another June 28 ruling in which the justices decided that Bush had the power to detain Yaser Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and held in a U.S. military jail.
“Yes, we would be in a position to argue that whatever rights to process they have [under the high court’s action] have been satisfied, and a fair opportunity for them to be heard and to have a fact-finding process determining the legality of their detention has been provided. And that process is sufficient,” a senior Justice Department official said.
But Alex Arriaga, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said, “It seems pretty clear that this goes out of its way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision.”
9 headed for tribunals
Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said that the department had decided not to release the names or nationalities of the nine men Bush classified as eligible for trial by tribunal and that no charges were brought against them. Shavers also said the men were not being given access to lawyers.
Bush in July 2003 designated six other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as eligible for trials before tribunals, which are formally called military commissions. Of those, three have been charged.
