U.S. Reviews Decision To Designate ‘Enemy Combatants’

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The New York Sun

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The military is reviewing its decision to classify hundreds of Guantanamo Bay inmates as “enemy combatants,” a step that could lead to new hearings for men who have spent years behind bars in indefinite detention.

Navy Captain Theodore Fessel Jr., the lead officer at Guantanamo for the Defense Department agency that oversees the panels, said authorities have begun seeking new evidence that may warrant new hearings after the process came under fire.

“With all the outside eyes looking in at the process, it’s forcing us to say, ‘Okay, did we take everything into consideration when we did the Combatant Status Review Tribunals?”‘ Captain Fessel told journalists Wednesday at the naval base in southeast Cuba.

Critics called it an overdue acknowledgment that the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals are unfairly geared toward labeling detainees the enemy, even when they pose little danger. Simply redoing the tribunals won’t fix the problem, they said, because the system still allows coerced evidence and denies detainees legal representation.

Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham, an insider who has become one of the most prominent critics of the tribunal process, said yesterday that the development shows the system is fatally flawed. “Conducting new CSRTs … repudiates every prior assertion that the original CSRTs were valid acts,” Colonel Abraham said.


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