The US 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.
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.
Navy Capt. Theodore Fessel Jr., the lead officer at Guantanamo for the Defence Department agency that oversees the panels, said authorities have begun seeking new or previously overlooked 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, 'OK, did we take everything into consideration when we did the Combatant Status Review Tribunals?" Fessel told journalists on Wednesday at the naval base in southeast Cuba.
Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an insider who has become one of the most prominent critics of the tribunal process, said yesterday the development shows the system is fatally flawed.
"Ultimately, conducting new CSRTs - even discussing the possibility - repudiates every prior assertion that the original CSRTs were valid acts," Abraham told The Associated Press in an e-mail yesterday. "They are, in essence, both a hypocritical act as well as an act of moral cowardice."
