Legal News

Goodbye, Gitmo? Judges Accept Obama?s Request to Halt Trials

By Dan Slater

As we highlighted this morning, in yesterday’s inaugural address, President Obama said: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” For Obama, it seems, the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay represents that “false choice.”

Today, reports the AP, military judges “promptly accepted” Obama’s request to suspend war crimes trials at Gitmo, “in what may be the beginning of the end for the Bush administration’s system of trying alleged terrorists.” The judges agreed to the 120-day halt in the cases of five men charged in the 9/11 attacks and a Canadian accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. Similar orders are expected in other pending cases before the Guantanamo military commission.

An attorney for one of the 9/11 defendants, Ramzi Binalshibh, told the WaPo she had no objection to the suspension but would like to use the 120-day delay to resolve motions before the court, including whether her client is competent to represent himself. (In December, we noted, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged 9/11 mastermind, and other accused men said they wanted to confess to the 9/11 conspiracy and asked a military judge to take their guilty pleas. But they reportedly changed their minds when they learned they could not act together until the competency issue was resolved.)

The 120-day suspension “has the practical effect of stopping the process, probably forever,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, the lawyer for the Canadian defendant, Omar Khadr, told the AP. “[Khadr] is anxious. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, none of us knows what’s going to happen,” Kuebler said after discussing the delay with the 22-year-old prisoner. “But we are all hopeful and somewhat optimistic that this ruling now creates a space for the two governments to do something constructive to solve this case.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).