Second Officer Criticizes Gitmo Tribunals
A second Army officer has submitted a court affidavit questioning the fairness of the process used to decide whether detainees at Guantanamo Bay are enemy combatants.
The sworn statement said the government failed to present evidence favorable to the detainees and the panels hearing the cases were pressured to side with the government, SCOTUSblog reports.
“Much of the material presented was supplied by intelligence agencies and were summaries that were not necessarily justified by the underlying evidence,” the affidavit said.
An Army Reserve major provided the statement to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in an appeal by Adel Hassan Hamad of Sudan, who contends he was wrongly branded as a terrorist. The government says Hamad worked for groups that provided support for terrorist causes.
The Army officer’s name was deleted from the court papers. His experience as a judge on 49 Combatant Status Review Tribunals led him to conclude that “training was minimal” and “the process was not well defined,” the Associated Press reports.
He said he sat on six cases in which the panel decided the detainee was not an enemy combatant. The Pentagon ordered new hearings that resulted in opposite findings, even though the government did not offer sufficient new evidence.
Another Army reserve lawyer, Stephen Abraham, has filed an affidavit with the U.S. Supreme Court that contends the military review process was flawed.
