Overseer of Military Tribunals Is Named

The Pentagon took a step closer Tuesday to holding military trials for suspected terrorists held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appointing a retired Army general to oversee the tribunals and a four-member review panel to hear appeals of cases.

John D. Altenburg Jr., a former senior Army lawyer and two-star general, was chosen for the job. As “appointing authority” for the tribunals, he will approve charges against detainees, refer cases to trial and negotiate any conflicts during trials.

None of the 660 suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay has been charged, but the first case is expected soon. The appointments on Tuesday were the last major procedural steps planned before any suspects are charged and brought to trial in what would be the United States’ first use of military tribunals since World War II.

Altenburg was assistant judge advocate general for the Army when he retired in 2002. Since June, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has overseen the tribunal process.

The Pentagon announcement comes amid growing pressure from human rights organizations to put the prisoners on trial, release them or at least say what is planned for them.

Critics complain that the open-ended, indefinite detentions have led to a deterioration in the prisoners’ health and dozens of suicide attempts at the prison set up shortly after the start of the war in Afghanistan in October 2001.

This month a federal appeals court ruled that terrorist suspects held in secret U.S. custody in foreign territory deserved access to lawyers and the American legal system.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the “detention of foreign nationals captured abroad ... and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”

Some have been held for as long as two years at Guantanamo, without access to lawyers or family. The Pentagon contends that the base is technically on international soil.

The four members of the review panel named by the Pentagon are Griffin Bell, U.S. attorney general in the Carter administration and a former federal appeals judge; Edward Biester, a former congressman and judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Bucks County, Pa.; William T. Coleman Jr., U.S. secretary of transportation in the Ford administration; and Frank Williams, chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, who was an Army captain during the Vietnam War.

The four are to serve for two years, and will be temporarily commissioned as Army major generals, the Pentagon said. Others may be named to the panel later. They will select from among themselves the three members who will hear specific appeals, the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon also named Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway as Altenburg’s legal advisor. Hemingway retired from the Air Force in 1996 and was recalled to active duty last summer. He has served as a staff judge advocate at several levels in the Air Force and was a senior judge on the Air Force Court of Military Review as well as director of the Air Force Judiciary.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said military trials will be as open to public scrutiny as possible without compromising classified information or protected witnesses.