WASHINGTON, 2 September 2005 — The Pentagon announced changes on Wednesday to the way it will conduct military trials of foreign terrorism suspects, but critics dismissed them as window dressing that failed to fix fundamental defects.
The steps approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld included changing the roles of the presiding officer and the other members of the military tribunals that will conduct the trials, the Pentagon said.
About 505 prisoners are being held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and will face trials by the tribunals.
“We made these changes and have been working on it for some time to try to produce a better and more efficient system,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, legal advisor in the trial process, told a briefing.
“I don’t consider it an admission that the system was flawed. I’ve maintained consistently that we would try to make those improvements that were necessary to the process as we moved along.” Jumana Musa, Amnesty International’s observer to the trials, said many problems remained. These included allowing the admission of evidence obtained through torture or hearsay and the US military’s refusal to allow any independent judicial review.
Amnesty and other human rights organizations have been critical of the trial process and wider issues concerning the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo since 2002.
The changes were announced after a federal appeals court ruled in July that Pentagon plans for special panels of military officers to try foreign terrorism suspects were lawful. They would be the first such US war crimes trials since World War II.
The appeals court ruling reversed a lower-court decision that halted these “military commission” proceedings last year.
“No substantive change was made to the process,” said a statement by the lawyers representing Australian Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks, Marine Corps Maj. Michael Mori and civilian Joshua Dratel.
“The most recent manipulations of the military commission procedures represent a desperate attempt to salvage the failed commission process and a confirmation that Mr. Hicks will not receive a fair trial,” Mori and Dratel said.
Hemingway said the changes stemmed in part from “lessons learned” during initial hearings held in the first trials at Guantanamo last summer before the process came to a halt.
The first trials due to resume were the cases of Hicks and Yemeni Salim Ahmed Hamdan, but Hemingway was unable to say when.
The new rules state a defendant can be barred from seeing classified evidence to be used against him at trial unless such action would deny him a “full and fair trial.” But they left that decision up to the presiding officer appointed by the Pentagon.
They also make the commission’s presiding officer act more like a judge, ruling on legal issues, while other members of the panel act more like a jury, deciding on a verdict and sentence.
Twelve Guantanamo detainees have been deemed eligible for trial before military commissions and four have been charged, with the Pentagon saying eight more will be charged soon.
Critics have lashed the Pentagon for creating a new legal system from scratch for the trials rather than using the respected military justice system.
Musa said the Pentagon announcement amounted to changing the rules in the middle of the game. “You can’t have any kind of fair system of justice that can change at any moment,” he said.
