Guantanamo Tribunals to Work Fast

The Pentagon on Friday outlined an ambitious plan to grant all 594 Defense Department detainees at Guantanamo Bay jail hearings on whether they are properly imprisoned as “enemy combatants.”

But Navy Secretary Gordon R. England said he had no information on whether some detainees were under CIA control and might not be covered by the plan.

After holding detainees for more than two years since the war in Afghanistan began, the hearings by a panel of military officers overseen by England will work quickly. Three tribunals each plan to hear from four detainees a day six days a week for a total of 72 a week, with extra time for complex cases. The goal is to finish by late November.

Detainees deemed to have been wrongly held will be released to their home countries, England said.

The panel was crafted shortly before the Supreme Court overruled the Bush administration and granted detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, access to U.S. courts. It was part of an effort to grant them the due process the court later ordered.

But military justice varies from its civilian counterpart. Prisoners will have military officers to represent them, not lawyers, and those representatives will not maintain their client’s confidentiality, as a lawyer would, England said.

“We want all the facts to come forward. So we don’t want client privilege where some data is not discussed,” he said.

Unlike civilian courts and even military court-martial proceedings, prisoners facing the reviews would not be identified by name, to protect their privacy rights, he said. It remained unclear how public the hearings would be.

Civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, have broadly criticized the tribunals , singling out the lack of legal counsel for their strongest criticisms.

“It really is a bizarre suggestion that this is in any way a fair process to determine the freedom or detention of an individual,” said Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett.

England was also asked about a Los Angeles Times article that said Pentagon officials had tentatively agreed during a meeting last month to deny annual reviews to some detainees and to keep their existence secret “for intelligence reasons.” He would not confirm or deny it.

Some Defense officials had said they believed some Guantanamo detainees were under CIA control. CIA officials denied that they controlled detainees at the facility, but said any detainees under their control would not be subject to Defense Department rules.