Guantanamo guilty go free while ‘cleared’ stay

MIAMI, (Reuters) – Most of the prisoners convicted  of terrorism crimes in the Guantanamo tribunals are free men  today while most of the Guantanamo captives cleared for release  in the regular U.S. courts are still imprisoned at Guantanamo.

The patchwork system for determining the fate of Guantanamo  prisoners is, as President Barack Obama said in a speech on  Thursday, “quite simply a mess.”
But, barring guilty pleas, it will be nearly impossible to  complete any more trials at Guantanamo while sticking to  Obama’s order to shutter the detention camp in Cuba by Jan.  22.
The Guantanamo trials formally known as military  commissions have been frozen until Sept. 20 to give the Obama  administration time to tweak the rules.
That leaves four months until the Guantanamo prison is  scheduled to close, and whatever new rules Obama persuades  Congress to adopt are likely to raise new legal challenges that  cannot be resolved within that time frame.

“You’re going to be litigating in a brand new system where  things have to be tested for the first time,” said Michael  Berrigan, deputy chief defense counsel for the Guantanamo  trials.
“There’s really no way, even if the judges try and expedite  the litigation, that you’re going to have all that stuff  briefed and resolved … I wouldn’t bet they’re going to get  any trials done through to completion by the time the year is  up,” Berrigan said.

Of the 14 cases pending when the tribunals were frozen,  only two were anywhere near to being ready for trial, and some  of the evidentiary issues in those cases would have to be  litigated anew under Obama’s plan to restrict the use of  hearsay evidence and coerced evidence.

The widely criticized Guantanamo tribunals were authorized  by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001  to try foreign terrorism suspects outside the regular civilian  and military courts.

The Pentagon planned to try 80 prisoners at Guantanamo. But  because of constant legal challenges and revisions in the  system only three cases have been resolved — one with a guilty  plea, one in a contested trial and one in a trial where no  defence was presented.

DUCT TAPE WON’T HELP
Two of the Guantanamo convicts were relatively small fish  who served sentences of only a few months and are free today,  one in Australia and one in Yemen. The third, al Qaeda media  secretary Ali Hamza al Bahlul, is still at Guantanamo serving a  life sentence with no indication where he will go when  Guantanamo closes.
Human rights advocates say revising the system yet again is  a mistake and it’s time to move the cases into the regular  courts.

“It is a system so broken, so discredited, that it cannot  be saved by any amount of administrative or legislative duct  tape,” said Amnesty International’s executive director Larry  Cox.
It’s also unlikely the U.S. Supreme Court will act by the  January shut-down date to break the logjam over what to do with  Guantanamo prisoners whom the lower courts have found to be  wrongly held in a war that could last forever.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that the Guantanamo  prisoners have the right to contest their detention in the U.S.  federal courts. So far those courts have upheld detention for  five prisoners and ordered 25 others freed because the  government could produce no evidence that they were a danger to  America or its allies.
Twenty-one of the 25 are still at Guantanamo because the  United States refuses to accept them, hasn’t persuaded any  other country to accept them and can’t send them home because  of fears they will be persecuted in their homelands.

A federal judge ordered that some of them, 17 Chinese  Muslims of the Uighur minority, be freed in the United States.  But an appeals court ruled in April that judges don’t have  authority to give such an order.

“Although the court can decide he’s being held unlawfully,  it can’t actually order his release from Guantanamo,” is how  ACLU attorney Ben Wizner summed up the ruling.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide in June  whether to hear an appeal by the Uighurs. If it accepts the  case, it would not hear arguments until the next session begins  in October, making a ruling unlikely before the January  deadline to shut Guantanamo.