Report: Guantanamo Tribunals to Begin Anew
The Obama administration is reportedly preparing to drop a ban on military tribunals against prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay terror detention facility which has been in place since the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated.
The New York Times reports that with Republicans now in control of the House of Representatives, and consensus opinion appearing to have shifted away from the White House's effort to try terror suspects in U.S. courts, the president is relenting.
Unnamed administration officials tell the Times that Defense chief Robert Gates is expected to sign off on an order permitting the tribunals to resume at Guantanamo, and new charges against some of the people in detention could be filed within weeks.
New draft regulations for how the tribunals should be conducted have already been circulated among military justice officials, according to the Times' sources.
Shutting down the prison camp on a U.S. military base in Cuba has been a goal of the Obama administration since the campaign trail. On Mr. Obama's inauguration day, Gates ordered a halt to all new military cases against Guantanamo detainees.
Administration moves to see the suspects brought to the U.S. mainland and tried in U.S. criminal courts failed to gain much steam politically or among the general population.
Among the roughly 80 detainees still held at Guantanamo, a handful have already been designated by the U.S. Justice Department for military tribunals, and these men are likely to be some of the first to face charges when the ban is dropped, reports the Times.
The most recognizable of these suspects is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi suspected of plotting the 2000 bomb attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen.