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Home Front: WoT
US argues Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights
2004-12-04
A group of 10 Guantanamo Bay prisoners who are waging a legal battle over their detention have no constitutional right to do so, US Government lawyers said and urged a judge to dismiss their cases. Lawyers for the men being held as enemy combatants at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, argued that their clients have the right to a fair trial and should be given the proper opportunity to defend themselves. They urged US District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green to deny the Government's motion to dismiss the cases and to declare invalid the current military tribunal process at Guantanamo because it fails to provide due process of law.

Government lawyers told Judge Green the prisoners - who have all been deemed "enemy combatants" by a US military tribunal, which means they are not entitled to the protections normally given to prisoners of war - did not have the right to be heard in court. "We think that the enemy petitioners... have no constitutional rights," said Brian Boyle, principal deputy associate attorney-general at the Justice Department. "They are enemy combatants."

Human rights groups and lawyers for the prisoners say the tribunals are unfair because they do not permit the prisoners to see the evidence against them or allow them access to legal counsel. The International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the US military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a claim the Pentagon rejects. Judge Green focused on the concept of "enemy combatants," and she posed a series of hypothetical scenarios to Mr Boyle over who could be considered an enemy combatant. In one answer, Mr Boyle said an old woman in Switzerland who unknowingly gave money to an Afghan charity that passed the money to Al Qaeda could be viewed as an enemy combatant and therefore could be jailed and subject to a military tribunal. "The Government showed its true colours today," said Barbara Olshansky of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, one of the attorneys who argued for the prisoners. "If under this definition of enemy combatant a Swiss granny who gave money to charity can be detained indefinitely at Guantanamo, then anyone who unintentionally acts in a way the Government finds suspicious is in danger of losing their freedom," she said.

More than 500 people are being held at Guantanamo Bay, after being detained during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and in other operations in the US "war against terrorism". Most of the suspected Al Qaeda members and Taliban fighters being held at the facility have not been charged or named as eligible for trial in a military tribunal. The tribunals, formally called military commissions, were authorised by President George W Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Thomas Wilner, one of the detainees' lawyers, cited a Supreme Court ruling in June that terror suspects had the right to use the US judicial system to contest their confinement. "The world is waiting to see if American justice can work," Mr Wilner said.

Joe Margulies, an attorney representing another prisoner, said the current military system to determine whether or how to charge the prisoners was inadequate. "The (tribunals) are the perfect storm of procedural inadequacy," he said. "The evidence against most prisoners consists largely of uncorroborated statements made to their interrogators."
Posted by:God Save The World

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