GUANTANAMO BAY US NAVAL BASE (Cuba), June 4: The US government suffered a potentially major setback to its offensive on Guantanamo Bay detainees in a surprise legal ruling on Monday, attorneys and activists said.
Colonel Peter Brownback threw out murder and other charges against Omar Khadr, a 20-year-old Al Qaeda foot-soldier, arguing that his military commission lacked the jurisdiction to try the Canadian-born detainee.
The head of US military defence attorneys at this detention camp, Colonel Dwight Sullivan, said no Guantanamo detainee has been ruled to be an “unlawful enemy combatant” as required by US law.
Therefore, he told reporters, the military commissions set up by an act of Congress last year had no legal grounding to prosecute Khadr or other detainees.
Demanding that the government take their cases instead to US civilian courts, Sullivan said: “This is more evidence that the commissions system does not work, and we do not need any more evidence that it's a failure.” Sullivan and human-rights campaigners said that Brownback's ruling did not address the legality of the US government's detention of 380 “war on terror”suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
The US government insists it has the right to keep them imprisoned without charge, and Khadr himself looks set to remain in custody in legal limbo.
The only full Guantanamo trial held so far has been that of 31-year-old “Australian Taliban” David Hicks, who was jailed for nine months in March after reaching a plea bargain with US prosecutors. He is now imprisoned in Adelaide.
Sullivan said the Khadr ruling could have implications for Hicks. “I'm sure his counsel are probably already examining this issue.” The requirement that only “unlawful enemy combatants” can be tried at Guantanamo Bay was laid down by Congress in the Military Commissions Act (MCA), passed in September last year.
But Brownback found that when Khadr was reviewed for the only time by a so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunal in September 2004, he was classed under the old definition used at Guantanamo of “enemy combatant.” Another terror suspect, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national born in 1970, also faced arraignment later Monday, accused of serving both as a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden and as the Al-Qaeda mastermind's personal chauffeur.
It was unclear whether the judge in Hamdan's case, Captain Keith Allred, would follow the precedent set by Brownback, an army judge who was brought out of retirement three years ago to oversee Guantanamo commissions.
But Priti Patel, associate attorney at Human Rights First, said the Khadr case was “a significant setback for the (George W.) Bush administration.” “It's called into question all the legal categories used by the government in its bid to create a whole new system of justice,” she said.
Prosecution lawyers sought 72 hours to decide whether to appeal Brownback's ruling. Sullivan said they faced the problem that in the Guantanamo system, there is no higher court to which to appeal.
Jumana Musa of Amnesty International USA said such problems bedevilled the government's treatment of Guantanamo detainees.
“It's what happens when you try to set up a system of justice untethered to any previous known system of justice,” she said.—AFP
