WASHINGTON: The US military tribunals set up to try Guantanamo detainees came under attack almost as soon as President George Bush authorised them in the weeks after the horror of Sept 11, 2001.
The Bush administration wanted the tribunals to be one of its main legal weapons in the ‘war on terror’, but the Supreme Court dealt the plan a major blow on Thursday.
The ruling was the latest setback to administration efforts to try ‘war on terror’ detainees — plans which have attracted widespread criticism from the outset.
Foreign governments have expressed doubts, US legal groups were shocked by the tribunal rules, military officers acting as defenders for Guantanamo detainees, and even many prosecutors, condemned the system as unfair.
Even the message being sent by the administration was controversial, analysts said.
“Practical considerations aside, the creation of the nation’s first war crimes tribunals since World War II sent a symbolic message, putting the war against Islamic extremism in the same class as the war against Nazism,” said Jonathan Mahler, who is writing a book about the Hamdan case.
The US Congress had no role in deciding the first war crimes tribunals since Nuremberg after World War II. Administration lawyers wrote all of the rules.
Detainees and their civilian lawyers would not be allowed in court when ‘classified’ evidence was presented. Inmates could not represent themselves. The Pentagon listened in on conversations between inmates and their lawyers.
While the death sentence could be ordered in some cases, there was no independent appeals procedure laid down.
When the first preliminary hearing was held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in Aug 2004, the military defenders said even the makeup of the panels was unfair.
One lieutenant colonel on the first judging panel said he had been involved in the transportation of prisoners from Afghanistan to the detention camp in Cuba.
Another, an air force colonel, was a senior intelligence officer who operated in Afghanistan from Nov 2001 to Feb 2002 as US forces brought down and chased the Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden.
Most of the some 450 prisoners remaining at Guantanamo were caught in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Lt Commander Charles Swift, a military lawyer for Hamdan, the detainee who challenged the tribunals before the Supreme Court, said at the time that the United States ‘appears to be meting out victor’s justice’ by letting the officers stay on the panel.
The US government said that prisoners could not go before civilian courts because of the secret nature of the evidence that would be given. They would not use military courts martial because the Guantanamo prisoners were considered ‘enemy combatants’ who do not get Geneva Convention protection because they were not fighting for a state at war with the United States.
The tribunals have judging panels of between three and seven officers and can hear cases of murder, attacks on civilians, looting, hostage-taking, torture, terrorism and spying.
The first tribunal was constituted in June 2004. But since then only 10 inmates have been formally charged and no case has got beyond preliminary hearings.
The full trials were frozen awaiting the Supreme Court, whose ruling on Thursday would appear to send the administration back to square one.—AFP
