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Guantanamo detenus can still be tried by military

— Photo: AP

Discredited system: A chair and shackles fixed to the floor inside a room used for interrogation and interview of Guantanamo detenus, on a cell block at Camp 5 maximum-security detention facility, inside Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba.

New York: Barack Obama has incurred the criticism of civil liberty activists for the second time in a week by confirming that he is to continue to try Guantanamo detenus under the widely discredited military tribunal system set up under the former President, George W. Bush.

The Obama administration said it would introduce a number of reforms to the military commissions that are already processing 13 of the most serious cases of terrorist suspects held in the U.S. base in Cuba. The reforms would make the system fairer and more in line with U.S. justice, the administration insisted.

But lawyers who have campaigned against the tribunal system since it was introduced by Congress in 2006 under pressure from Mr. Bush said they were disappointed to see it revived. In his first week in the White House, Mr. Obama promised to close down Guantanamo within a year, raising hopes that he also intended to end the tribunals and transfer cases to civilian federal trials within the U.S.

The decision comes as the second blow this week to liberal opinion from the new administration. On Wednesday, the President instructed White House lawyers to try and block the release of photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers on the grounds that it would put American personnel at risk of reprisals.

On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Obama consistently called for the closure of Guantanamo and for normal rights and protections to be afforded the detainees. His view of the tribunals was more nuanced: he opposed their final form, calling them “an enormous failure”.

But he voted in favour of an earlier form of military hearings in which prisoners were granted more rights.

Constitutional lawyers, however, have rejected the argument that the tribunals can be improved to make them acceptable and workable. Shayana Kadidal, a Guantanamo lawyer with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, said that fairness was an issue but however extensively the system was reformed, “there is a problem of public confidence in the process both here and overseas”. Mr. Kadidal said the tribunals were a “disaster” that played into the hands of terrorists. “By trying them in a military setting, it allows terrorists to portray themselves as military figures and their victims as ‘collateral damage’.”

On the other hand, there has been growing opposition in Washington towards allowing any of the 241 detainees still held in Guantanamo to be tried on U.S. soil. The issue has increasingly been highlighted by Republican politicians, and many Democrats, nervous about the reaction of their constituents, have also expressed alarm.

A plea for $50 million from the White House to pay for the closure of Guantanamo and transfer the prisoners elsewhere has provoked a hostile response from Capitol Hill. A bill put forward by Democrats in the Senate would give the President the money, but on condition that none of the detainees ended up in any of the 50 states.

Only a small number of the detainees are expected to fall under the revised tribunals. Most of the Guantanamo prisoners are likely to be sent back to their countries of origin or, if deemed unacceptable for human rights reasons, to third party countries where those can be found. On Friday, an Algerian-born detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, was released from the base and sent to France to join relatives. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009

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