Obama moves to delay tribunals at Guantanamo

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA —  In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day halt of legal proceedings involving detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

The instruction came in a motion filed late Tuesday with a military court handling the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The motion called for “a continuance of the proceedings” until May 20 so that “the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically.”

The same motion was filed in another case set to resume today, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.

Such a request might not be automatically granted by military judges, and defense attorneys might not all agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and a system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and its unyielding attitude to foreign and domestic critics.

The legal maneuver appears designed to provide the Obama administration with time to refashion the prosecution system and potentially treat detainees as criminal defendants in federal court or to have them face war-crime charges in military courts-martial. It is also possible that the administration could re-form and relocate the military commissions before resuming trials.

The motion deflated some of the military officials here who had tried to make a success of the system, despite criticism of the military tribunals. Military prosecutors and other commission officials here were told not to speak to the press, according to a Pentagon official.

“It’s over; I don’t want to say any more,” said one official involved in the process.

Some advocates of ending the military commissions cheered the new administration’s action.

“We would rather have seen the charges withdrawn, but it’s a good indication that military commissions will not go forward,” said Stacy Sullivan, a counter-terrorism advisor for Human Rights Watch.

Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program at the ACLU, agreed that “this is a good step in the right direction” but added that “we still think that the unconditional withdrawal of all charges and shutting down this tainted system is warranted. The president’s order leaves open the option of this discredited system remaining in existence.”

Pretrial hearings for the Sept. 11 defendants were scheduled to resume today. Another case, involving Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15, was also about to begin.

Obama has said in recent interviews that closing the facility here is likely to be prolonged and complex. He is expected to soon sign an executive order detailing his plan to empty the facility.

Obama must decide how and where to prosecute detainees such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. He must convince communities in the United States that terrorist suspects can be safely moved to military or civilian prisons in the continental United States, and press other nations to repatriate or resettle prisoners who can be released.

And he must consider settling some small number of detainees in the United States to help convince allies to take others.