Suits Filed for Military Detainees

Lawyers for nine detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed lawsuits Friday demanding that their clients be tried or released.

The suits were the first of as many as 600 actions likely to be filed following a Supreme Court ruling this week that granted the prisoners access to American courts.

A group of attorneys filed the lawsuits in a federal court in Washington, saying they intend to consolidate the cases in one court rather than go “venue shopping” by filing in various districts throughout the United States. With 595 detainees being held, Pentagon officials had feared a scenario in which cases were filed across the nation.

“We want to get out of this what the U.S. Supreme Court says we should get out of it, which is immediate access to counsel,” attorney Clive Stafford-Smith said. “In due course, when we can, we intend to try to help everybody.”

The filings for writs of habeas corpus -- a demand for legal justification for their imprisonment -- were made possible after the high court struck down the Bush administration’s policy of indefinitely holding foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the Cuban brig without providing for trials.

The attorneys intend to file the cases in groups but know fewer than half of the names of the Guantanamo detainees. So far, most detainee identifications have come from their families, Stafford-Smith said. The Pentagon has offered few official identifications.

“I think there’s going to come a point where someone’s going to have to decide how do we help people who are not identified,” Stafford-Smith said.

The lawsuits filed Friday were on behalf of British citizens Moazzem Begg, seized in Pakistan, and Feroz Abbasi, who has not been charged but has been designated for a trial.

Also filing were lawyers for Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who lived in Germany, and for Mourad Benchallali, Nizar Sassi and Ridouane Khalid, all French citizens seized in Pakistan.

Cases were also filed on behalf of two British citizens seized at a peanut-processing plant in Gambia: Jamil El-Banna, a Jordanian Palestinian refugee, and Bisher Al-Rawi, an Iraqi refugee. The ninth detainee is Omar Khadr, a 17-year-old Canadian captured in Afghanistan in 2002.