Trial for 6 Algerian Guantanamo Bay detainees begins
WASHINGTON - The trial of six Algerian-Bosnians being held at Guantanamo Bay began yesterday at a federal courthouse in Washington D.C., the first after dozens of petitions for release moved forward following a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer said that detainees have constitutional rights.
Yesterday, as the detainees were authorized to listen in by telephone from the US military base in Cuba, Boston-based lawyer Stephen H. Oleskey, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, asked US District Judge Richard J. Leon to release them. Technical glitches prevented the detainees from hearing, so Leon ordered that a recording be sent immediately.
"Now the government at long last in 2008 must justify to you its decision to continue to imprison these men," Oleskey said in unclassified opening remarks. "Your Honor, we are confident that the indefinite imprisonment of our clients cannot be justified."
But the Department of Justice maintains that the men are dangerous enemy combatants affiliated with an Algerian terrorist group called GIA, and had been planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight US forces there.
"The detention of these petitioners is based on credible intelligence that they, as members or supporters of enemy forces, pose a threat to the United States," Nicholas Oldham, a lawyer with the Justice Department, said in his unclassified opening statement yesterday.
The men were arrested in Bosnia in October 2001 and accused by the US government of plotting to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo. US authorities have since dropped that charge. Bosnian authorities cleared the men, and then turned them over to US forces, who brought them to Guantanamo in January 2002.
A team of pro bono defense lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the men in 2004, invoking their constitutional right to a hearing before a judge. But the hearings were delayed until after a Supreme Court ruling in June.
The trial of Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohamed Nechla, Bensayah Belkacem, Mustafa Ait Idir, Saber Lahmar, and Hadj Boudella has been marked by closed sessions and sealed documents.
A series of separate military trials are taking place at Guantanamo Bay, but only two of about 225 detainees have completed war-crimes trials under the military commissions. 