| Followup from yesterday's article. |
In back-to-back arraignments for Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen and Canadian Omar Khadr the U.S. military's cases against the alleged al-Qaida figures dissolved because, the two judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction. They were the only two of the roughly 380 prisoners at Guantanamo charged with crimes, and the rulings stand to complicate efforts by the United States to try other suspected al-Qaida and Taliban figures in military courts.
Hamdan's military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said the detainee is "not subject to this commission" under legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bush last year. Hamdan is accused of chauffeuring bin Laden's and being the al-Qaida chief's bodyguard.
The new Military Commissions Act was written to establish military trials after the U.S. Supreme Court last year - ruling in a case brought by Hamdan - rejected the previous system. The judges agreed that there was one problem they could not resolve - the new legislation says only "unlawful enemy combatants" can be tried by the military trials, known as commissions. But Khadr and Hamdan had previously been identified by military panels only as enemy combatants, lacking the critical "unlawful" designation.
| This is a minor error, which they did us a service by catching now before the trial started. They'll go back to their word processors and insert "unlawful". |
The surprise decisions do not spell freedom for the detainees, who are imprisoned here along with the others suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Legal experts said Brownback apparently left open the door for a retrial for Khadr, and that the Defense Department can possibly fix the jurisdictional problem by holding new "combat status review tribunals" for any detainee headed to trial.
The Military Commissions Act specifically says that only those classified as "unlawful" enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted. The distinction is important because if they were "lawful," they would be entitled to prisoner of war status, which under the Geneva Conventions would entitle them to the same treatment under established military law that U.S. soldiers would get.
A Pentagon spokesman said the issue was little more than semantics. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon told The Associated Press said the entire Guantanamo system was set up to deal with people who act as "unlawful enemy combatants," operating outside any internationally recognized military, without uniforms, military ranks or other things that make them party to the Geneva Conventions. "It is our belief that the concept was implicit that all the Guantanamo detainees who were designated as 'enemy combatants' ... were in fact unlawful," Gordon said.