NYT : Officials Plan to Move Quickly for Terrorism Trials in Spring

Officials Plan to Move Quickly for Terrorism Trials in Spring

By NEIL A. LEWIS | September 30, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — Officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon said Friday that they would move quickly to adopt the regulations on treating terrorism suspects as soon as President Bush signed them law.

The military said it planned to go to trial with up to 14 senior members of Al Qaeda, as government lawyers prepared to defend a provision that would strip hundreds of other suspects of their right to challenge in court their detention.

The Justice Department officials said they would argue in court that the new law would wipe out all the suits by the 450 or so detainees who have been held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The bill would retroactively strip the detainees of the ability to file habeas corpus challenges that oblige the government to defend its reasons for detention before a federal judge.

Civil liberties groups are preparing to challenge that aspect of the law, most likely in an appeals court here that is already wrestling with a related suit on habeas corpus that was started before the new measure. The 14 senior Qaeda members at Guantánamo were recently sent there after as long as four years in secret Central Intelligence Agency custody.

The military is planning to put in motion the new procedures to try those suspects for war crimes before military commissions, though government and private lawyers estimate that the trials could begin no earlier than next spring.

The law provides for explicit Congressional approval of the commissions to try figures like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and other senior Qaeda prisoners who were in secret C.I.A. custody.

It is widely accepted that the new trials before a panel of military officers will take some time to organize.

“It’s clear that the trials are not going to occur anywhere in the near future,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a lawyer here who has closely followed the debate on the military commissions.

Kristine Huskey, a professor of clinical law at American University who represents a Guantánamo detainee, said it appeared that any trials would not start until spring at the earliest. Professor Huskey said that at a recent panel at her university, Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, the Air Force officer who is legal adviser for the commissions, said the Pentagon was planning to spend the next month or so preparing a manual of procedures for the commissions before proceeding.

In a conference call with civilian lawyers on Thursday, General Hemingway said that his office hoped to move as quickly as possible to begin the trials and that the Pentagon was setting up a new appeals panel for the military commissions that would be composed entirely of military appeals judges.

Under the commission system that the Supreme Court overturned, the appeals panel was to be made up of senior civilian lawyers like Judge Griffin Bell, attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, and William T. Coleman, a former transportation secretary.

Military officials and lawyers have estimated that charges against the Qaeda prisoners are not likely to be brought before the end of January. The hiring of defense lawyers and challenges would make it unlikely that any trial could begin before the spring, they said.

After the new regulations are published and possibly challenged, it is almost certain that commission prosecutors will begin preparing cases against some or all the 14 new prisoners. Mr. Bush has said they will face war crimes trials. Other officials have suggested that some of the 14 will not be charged.

Any of the 14 who are charged will be assigned military lawyers. At that point, they are likely to acquire civilian defense lawyers, too. Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has coordinated the assignment of volunteer lawyers for the hundreds of habeas suits, said several lawyers had expressed interest in representing the senior Qaeda officials.

Government lawyers and civil liberties groups say they expect the constitutionality of blocking habeas suits to be contested in the federal appeals court here.

After Mr. Bush signs the bill, government lawyers said, they expect to file briefs in the pending case in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The government is expected to argue that the suits filed by dozens of lawyers on behalf of all the Guantánamo detainees who were there before the 14 arrived this month are no longer valid.