Guantánamo trial delayed: judge invokes pending Supreme Court decision

20.5.08

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The Guantanamo FilesAs a recent decision by a military judge makes clear, the wheels of justice revolve in slow motion at Guantánamo, as those responsible for the exercise of political and judicial processes — the executive, Congress and the Supreme Court — engage in prolonged tussles that last for years. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports.

For most of 2008, the media’s interest in Guantánamo has focused not on the majority of the 273 prisoners who are still held there without charge or trial and largely unknown to the outside world, but on the 13 who have been plucked from the grinding obscurity of indefinite detention to face trial by Military Commission, an innovation unrelated to either the US courts or the US military’s own judicial processes that was conceived in November 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers.

I have written at length about the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions, most recently here, where I ran through the problems that have beset the proposed trials in the last month alone. These include boycotts by the prisoners themselves, and the sudden and unexplained decision to drop charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of six prisoners initially charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks. This was almost certainly because he, unlike the others, was tortured not in a secret prison run by the CIA (who cannot be compelled to provide evidence to the Commissions), but in Guantánamo itself, where no such exclusions apply.

Col. Morris DavisThe setbacks in the last month also include a blistering attack on the system by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Commissions, who accused his superiors of pressing ahead with politically motivated trials and of seeking to allow evidence obtained through torture, which, he pointed out, were destroying the trials’ credibility. So persuasive was Col. Davis’ testimony (in the case of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers), that on May 9, the judge in Hamdan’s case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, prohibited Col. Davis’ former boss, Brig. Gen. Thom Hartmann, from playing any further part in Hamdan’s forthcoming trial.

All these setbacks reflect badly on the integrity of the Commissions, of course, but until last Friday, discussions about the role of the Supreme Court in determining the prisoners’ status had been overlooked. This was understandable in one way, as it is now nearly eleven months since the Supreme Court decided to look once more at the prisoners’ rights (along the way reversing itself for the first time in 60 years), but was completely incomprehensible in another, as the Supreme Court’s pending decision has been the elephant in the room since last December, when former Solicitor General Seth Waxman (for the prisoners) and the soon-to-retire current Solicitor General Paul Clement (for the government) presented their cases in what was rightly billed at the time as “the most important habeas corpus case in modern history.”

Throughout this year, therefore, those who have been following developments at Guantánamo have been aware that a crucial decision has to be made before the Supreme Court’s current session ends in the summer. However, it was not until Capt. Allred spoke up on Friday, following on from his recently established notoriety with regard to Brig. Gen. Hartmann, that the justices were once more pushed back to center stage.

Postponing the start date for Salim Hamdan’s trial from June 2 to July 21, Capt. Allred stated that this will give the prosecutors and defense “the benefit of a decision that may well change the tenor or conduct of the trial,” as the Associated Press reported. He added that a delay will avoid the “potential embarrassment, waste of resources and prejudice to the accused,” if, as the AP put it, “the Supreme Court ruling forces a halt to the proceedings mid-trial.”

While Andrea Prasow, one of Hamdan’s lawyers, said that the defense team was “very pleased that the judge agrees that all parties will benefit from the Supreme Court’s guidance regarding the applicability of the Constitution to detainees held at Guantánamo,” it was more noticeable that Capt. Allred had, for the second time in a week, humiliated the government simply by taking his job seriously. It appears, moreover, that he has been studying his calendar closely, as he is more aware of the cycles of Supreme Court decisions than many reporters.

Although subsequently rebuffed by the executive and Congress, the Supreme Court has twice delivered rulings that have dealt severe blows to the administration’s credibility at the end of June.

The US Supreme CourtOn June 26, 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, the first challenge to Guantánamo that made it to the Supreme Court, the justices ruled 6-3 that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights — in other words, the right to challenge the legal limbo in which they were held — and demolished along the way the executive’s long-cherished belief that Guantánamo did not count as US territory, and was therefore beyond the reach of the US courts.

In his majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens emphasized the importance of habeas corpus, citing a 1945 case in which it was described as “a writ antecedent to statute … throwing its roots deep into the genius of our common law,” and a 1953 case dealing specifically with the detention of non-citizens in US custody: “Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.”

The second Supreme Court decision, on June 29, 2006, was just as significant, and the identity of its plaintiff was certainly not lost on Capt. Allred. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the justices ruled 5-3 that the Military Commissions were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. Concluding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — which forbids “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” — was “applicable” to Hamdan and others facing Military Commissions, Justice Stevens stated that it was Hamdan’s right to be tried by a “regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

On both occasions, the executive managed, one way or another, either to neutralize or otherwise dilute the Supreme Court’s decision, confirming that the nation’s leaders — and Dick Cheney in particular — believed that the executive branch of government was beyond the law — or, at least, had the right to redefine the law without necessarily being answerable to either Congress or the judiciary. Although lawyers were finally allowed access to the prisoners, and were enabled to begin filing habeas petitions, the executive behaved as though these were minor irritants rather than fundamental reforms of the existing system.

Within a month of the decision in Rasul v. Bush, military reviews — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — were introduced to justify the prisoners’ continued detention without charge or trial. Empowered to rely upon secret evidence — including hearsay, and information obtained through torture, coercion and bribery — the tribunals, which also prevented the prisoners from being represented by lawyers, were, as former insider Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham explained last year, manifestly unjust, consisting of information that was, for the most part, generalized, generic and badly-researched, and was, moreover, primarily designed to rubber-stamp the administration’s prior designation of the prisoners as “enemy combatants” without rights.

While the tribunals — and their equally unjust successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards — were busy behaving in a parallel world to that conceived by the Supreme Court, the executive then turned to Congress in an attempt to nullify the justices’ ruling in Rasul, hijacking the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of 2005, an anti-torture bill proposed by Senator John McCain, by not only excluding the CIA from legislation designed to prevent the use of torture by US forces, but also, through a peculiarly aberrant amendment to the bill, managing to strip the Guantánamo prisoners of their right to file habeas corpus claims.

The executive’s response to the ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was even swifter. Perhaps perturbed that Justice Anthony Kennedy had warned that “violations of Common Article 3 are considered ‘war crimes,’ punishable as federal offences, when committed by or against United States nationals and military personnel,” the executive responded to the implications of the justices’ ruling by removing 14 “high-value detainees” from the CIA’s secret prisons and transporting them to Guantánamo in September 2006, and then pressed Congress to revive the Commissions in the Military Commissions Act, which, for good measure, contained provisions designed to prevent the executive — or any of its agents — from ever being prosecuted for war crimes, and also reinforced the habeas-stripping terms of the DTA.

It remains to be seen what the Supreme Court will decide in its third ruling on Guantánamo, which, unlike Rasul and Hamdan, appears to be too close to call. The hope of all those who are shocked by the seemingly unending legal limbo in which the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners are held is that the Supreme Court will tackle both the excesses of the executive and the shortcomings of Congress by ruling that the prisoners have Constitutional habeas corpus rights.

Whatever the eventual outcome, however, Capt. Allred is to be commended for not only reminding the world that a Supreme Court decision is expected imminently, but also for reflecting on its importance, and applying it, correctly, to halt the rush to justice — or rush to injustice — that typifies those driving the Military Commissions towards hoped-for conclusions.

I doubt that he’s a popular figure in either the White House or the Pentagon at present, not just for postponing Salim Hamdan’s trial, but also because, in response to his ruling against Brig. Gen. Hartmann, lawyers for the five “high-value detainees” in the planned 9/11 trial have taken his lead to complain that the date set for their clients’ arraignment — June 5 — is unduly premature.

Mustafa al-HawsawiOn Monday, Army Maj. Jon Jackson, the lawyer for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who is accused of helping to finance the 9/11 attacks, sought to delay al-Hawsawi’s arraignment, arguing, as the Associated Press described it, that he has only met his client twice, that he “has been barred from discussing those meetings with his assistant defense counsel, Navy Lt. Gretchen Sosbee, because the military has not yet given her security clearance,” that he “has not received any potential evidence against al-Hawsawi supporting charges that ‘allege a complex conspiracy spanning several years,’” and that he and the other defense lawyers “have no place to store work product, discuss classified material or prepare for their case while in Cuba,” because, as the AP put it, “construction of a secure facility in Washington — which was to have been completed by the end of 2007 — has not even begun.”

In the days to come, details of other lawyers’ challenges will no doubt be made public, but for now it’s worth noting that Capt. Allred’s interventions are a shining example of one component in the system of checks and balances that is supposed to ensure justice in US society — the judiciary, albeit in an unlikely venue — acting as a necessary restraint on both Congress and the executive.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on CounterPunch, the Huffington Post and Antiwar.com.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009).


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One Response

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    After this article was published, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued a press release explaining that recently declassified notes made by al-Qahtani’s lawyer, Gita Gutierrez, indicated that he had been dropped from the 9/11 charges because he had attempted to commit suicide in April, after losing all hope for the future, and, as a result, is “incapable of participating in his own defense.”
    http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0520-10.htm

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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