No Day in Court for Some Detainees?

The Pentagon might release some Guantanamo Bay detainees deemed not to pose a security threat without first giving them access to civilian courts, a spokesman said Thursday.

Larry Di Rita, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told a news conference that no final decisions had been made about how the government would respond to Supreme Court decisions this week requiring that detainees be given a way to challenge their incarceration.

However, he said it was possible that if it could be determined that some people need not be held, then they also “need not necessarily be part of a judicial process.”

Di Rita referred to the Pentagon’s newly adopted system for annually reviewing each of the nearly 600 detention cases at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Under that system, a panel of three military officers would assess each case, but the detainees would not be represented by lawyers.

“If there are people who can be released after some due process of review that we’ve established, it’s worth considering whether that’s the right next thing to do,” Di Rita said.

The annual reviews are to be overseen by Navy Secretary Gordon R. England, who said last week before the Supreme Court rulings that he expected the first panel to meet within two weeks.

Most of the 595 detainees still at Guantanamo were captured in the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001, and most have been held without access to lawyers. Human rights groups have complained that the prisoners are in a legal limbo with little chance to gain release.

The annual review program was supposed to serve as the Pentagon’s answer to those critics.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could hear the detainees’ cases. The Bush administration contended that the Guantanamo detention facility was outside the reach of American law.

The court also ruled that the government had the right to seize and hold what it called enemy combatants, but that it could not indefinitely detain them with no meaningful way for them to challenge their captivity.

However, the ruling left it to other courts, the Bush administration and outside lawyers to sort out what happened next.