WASHINGTON, 10 July 2004 — Human rights activists demanded on Thursday that the United States give lawyers access to Guantanamo prisoners, and criticized an internal process devised by the Pentagon for these foreign terrorism suspects to contest whether they are being held lawfully.
The Pentagon said on Wednesday a newly created tribunal of three US military officers will conduct hearings to permit all of the approximately 594 prisoners held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their status as an “enemy combatant” rather than prisoner of war.
The announcement came in response to the Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to use US courts to challenge their confinement. But the Pentagon said Guantanamo prisoners cannot have a lawyer for the tribunal hearings, and that unspecified security and other arrangements must be resolved before detainees can have access to lawyers for court challenges to their imprisonment.
“The US government should allow detainees access to lawyers and to their families and permit detainees to begin to challenge their detention in the federal court system,” said Alexandra Arriaga, director of government relations for Amnesty International USA.
“They’ve held people for over two years now. They should know at this point who they suspect of a crime, charge them, and try them in a fair court of justice in an open process. And the others should be released,” Arriaga said.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called the administration’s announcement a “serious, systematic process that responds directly to some of the, if you will, intimations of the ruling, that there’s a way that this can be done.”
“The intent is clear. And the intent is to be utterly faithful to the Supreme Court decision,” Di Rita told a Pentagon briefing. The United States began in January 2002 imprisoning at Guantanamo non-US citizens caught in what President George W. Bush calls the global war in terrorism.
Human rights activists have called Guantanamo a “legal black hole” where the United States holds prisoners indefinitely without charges or access to lawyers. Rachel Meeropol, a human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, called the new procedures inadequate and illegal, and said they fall far short of satisfying the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The fact is they’re coming up with these procedures on the fly,” said Meeropol, whose group has filed cases in federal court seeking the release of several Guantanamo prisoners. Arriaga said that while the government should be doing everything possible in light of the court ruling to facilitate judicial review of the lawfulness of the detentions, it instead appears to be trying to narrow the scope of the review. Arriaga noted that the new process remains entirely within the US military, and that all sorts of evidence will be admissible, including from anonymous witnesses and statements that may have been coerced.
The new tribunal was detailed in an order written by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The order stated that “the tribunal is not bound by the rules of evidence such as would apply in a court of law” and that there will be “a rebuttal presumption in favor of the government’s evidence.” Officials said they will proceed with plans to have separate military panels review on an annual basis whether or not to release each of the prisoners or continuing holding them.
