Legal News

Prosecutor?s Resignation Could Put Gitmo Cases in Hands of Next Prez

By Dan Slater

Last week we told you about Darrel J. Vandeveld, a former Gitmo prosecutor who, amid a crisis of conscience, resigned from both the military commissions and active military duty.

This week brings us more Vandeveld-related news. Yesterday, the Pentagon dismissed war crimes charges in the cases of five detainees. Vandeveld had been handling all five cases. The dismissed charges, reports the NYT, included those against Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the U.S. The dismissals, writes the AP, means the next administration will probably get to decide what to do with the cases. (Here’s another report from the WaPo.)

But the cases are far from over, at least according to Gitmo’s chief military prosecutor, Col. Lawrence J. Morris, who said he asked for the dismissals so Vandeveld’s files could be reviewed. “We have plenty of evidence to convict all of them,” Colonel Morris said told the NYT, indicating that he would refile charges. He said it was better to review cases “than the opposite, which is show yourself to be so pigheaded that you would stick to the way you originally charged a case.”

The other detainees whose charges were dismissed Tuesday were: Noor Uthman Muhammed, Sufyiam Barhoumi, Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi and Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani. The Pentagon has suggested that they were part of a terrorism cell.

The dismissals came in the same week that Bush administration lawyers abandoned efforts to prove that six other Gitmo detainees took part in a 2001 plan to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The six were at the center of Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court’s June ruling that foreign nationals held at Gitmo have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. Their case is scheduled for a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington as soon as next week. Those hearings are to be the first in which the administration is to provide a court with a full explanation of its reasons for holding detainees.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 22, 2008 (boomark / email).