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Pending Ruling Stalls Guantanamo Tribunals
Jane Sutton
Reuters
May 17, 2006
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE (Reuters) - Hearings this week for two Guantanamo war crimes defendants were canceled or cut short as their attorneys opted to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the legitimacy of special military tribunals set up by the Bush administration.
Uncertainty over the pending ruling has stymied prosecutors' efforts to complete the preliminary hearings, even as they face criticism for holding hundreds of prisoners at the U.S. military base at GuantanamoBay in Cuba for more than four years without trial.
"We would like to keep cases moving so they might be ready (for trial) when we get a Supreme Court decision," said the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Moe Davis.
Lawyers for a Yemeni prisoner, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, argued before the Supreme Court in March that the tribunals, set up after the September 11 attacks, are unconstitutional because they allow the president, through his military subordinates, to define the crime, choose the prosecutor and judges and set all the rules.
The court is expected to rule by the end of next month.
An Afghan detainee, Abdul Zahir, appeared briefly before a tribunal on Wednesday
His military lawyer, Lt. Col. Thomas Bogar, had asked for a hearing after Zahir was moved from a medium-security camp, where prisoners live in groups, to a maximum-security facility where detainees live alone in concrete cells.
REQUEST WITHDRAWN
Bogar initially asked the presiding officer to reverse the move, but withdrew the request at Wednesday's hearing, in part because he wanted to see if the Supreme Court ruling in the Hamdan case sheds light on his client's rights.
"I think from a legal standpoint we may have more of a legal bearing after Hamdan," Bogar said after the hearing.
Zahir is accused of being an al Qaeda paymaster who took part in a grenade attack on a car full of civilians in Afghanistan in March 2002.
The other prisoner scheduled for a hearing this week, Ghassan al Sharbi, won a stay on Friday after a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Saudi captive could suffer irreparable harm if he appeared before a tribunal that could be deemed illegal in a month.
Sharbi, an electrical engineer accused of being an al Qaeda bombmaker, was the fourth among the 10 defendants charged so far to have his case frozen until after the ruling. Pretrial hearings scheduled for June 5-9 have been canceled, though others set later in the month are still expected to take place.
All 10 defendants are accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to attack civilians and property, and would face life in prison if convicted.
The tribunals are the first convened by the U.S. military since World War Two. Davis said charges are "in the pipeline" for another two dozen Guantanamo prisoners and that President George W. Bush had already signed off on charges against two of them.
But even those are not expected to be filed until after the Supreme Court rules, Davis said.
"The Hamdan case is the linchpin," Davis said.
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