Officer criticizes military tribunals

An Army reserve officer who served on a military panel at Guantánamo Bay that determined whether a detainee should be held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" has said the process is deeply flawed, relying on vague evidence prepared by poorly trained personnel, and is subject to undue pressure from the military chain of command to rule against detainees, according to an affidavit unsealed on June 22. In the first account of the military review process by a participant, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham wrote that when he and two other officers assigned to serve on the tribunal concluded that a detainee should not be classified as an "enemy combatant," his superiors in charge of the process forced him to reopen the hearing so the government could present more evidence. After they reconsidered the case but refused to reverse their decision, he wrote, their superiors questioned them in follow-up meetings about "what went wrong" with the case. Abraham was never asked to serve on another panel, according to the affidavit. Defense lawyers are hailing the affidavit as proof that the military's Combatant Status Review Tribunals, or CSRTs, are "kangaroo courts" set up to justify holding nearly 400 detainees at Guantánamo Bay. "I think this shows what we already suspected, which was that the CSRT tribunals are a sham," said Matt MacLean , an attorney representing a Kuwaiti detainee who sought out Abraham's statement to prove that the system in general is unfair. "But it is significant because it is the first evidence we have from the inside. It is the first time we have even had the identity of anybody involved in the process."