Pentagon vs. prisoners
JUST A WEEK after the Supreme Court jolted the Bush administration by declaring that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president" to deny rights to prisoners, the Defense Department has cobbled together a flawed tribunal process for detainees at Guantanamo. The Pentagon should change course and meet basic due process standards before another court orders it to.
In one of its two rulings last week, the court said the approximately 600 detainees at Guantanamo have the right to challenge their status as "enemy combatants" in federal court or an equivalent neutral entity, even though the base is on Cuban soil. The court did not explicitly say the detainees should have the right to counsel, but in a similar case decided last week involving a US citizen who was classified as an enemy combatant, the court said he must be allowed counsel. Yet in its plan for the tribunals, the Pentagon has stubbornly decided not to provide detainees with lawyers.
Most of the detainees were captured during the war in Afghanistan in 2001, many by US allies who were offered bounties for individuals they rounded up. Few, if any, have had a chance in the almost three years since to contest their designation as enemy combatants.
No one has argued that US troops capturing enemy fighters must provide them with battlefield lawyers to determine their status. But the embarrassing implosions in recent weeks of terrorism-related cases the government had brought against a Guantanamo chaplain, a lawyer in Oregon, and a Nepalese visitor to New York all buttress the Supreme Court's view in last week's rulings that justice requires a stronger check on the actions of the administration.
Under the Pentagon's plan, detainees would have, instead of a lawyer, a "personal representative" -- a US military officer who could help them build a case before a three-member Combatant Status Review Panel.
The panel would consist of three military officers whose "neutrality" would be based on their having had no role in capturing, interrogating, or determining the status of the detainee before them. It is still unclear whether consultations between detainees and their "personal representatives" would be confidential or whether the proceedings would be public.
Both Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights have decried the Pentagon's plan. The center criticized it for failing to provide detainees with lawyers and for not guaranteeing that the government would not use evidence against the detainees based on coercive interrogation methods.
Just to meet the requirements of the Third Geneva Convention, the Pentagon should have long since given the detainees the chance to challenge their enemy combatant status. The tribunals cannot continue to deny people their right to due process. 