NYT: Officials See Qaeda Trials Using New Law In 2007

[Hissyspit]

November 3, 2006
Officials See Qaeda Trials Using New Law in 2007

By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — The Pentagon expects to begin conducting the first war crimes trials at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the new military commission law by summer, senior military officials have said.

But the trials will not involve any of 14 senior Qaeda operatives recently sent to Guantánamo from secret C.I.A. custody, the officials added. Instead, military prosecutors are planning to roll out the new system by trying some of the 10 people previously charged with lesser crimes whose earlier trials were aborted when the Supreme Court struck down the previous system of military commissions as unlawful.

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The Pentagon had been criticized for the first round of hearings in which many of the procedures appeared to be made up by military judges as they went along. The new manual of procedures is aimed at eliminating the problem.

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Col. Dwight H. Sullivan of the Marines, the chief defense lawyer for the commissions, said that those provisions might be well intentioned but that enforcing them was almost certain to be impossible.

“If you don’t have any meaningful prohibition against the admission of hearsay evidence,” Colonel Sullivan said, “then evidence obtained by torture can be laundered.”

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