At Gitmo, Hearings As Usual

[unhappycamper]

At Gitmo, Hearings As Usual
January 19, 2009
Associated Press

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Military judges in a Guantanamo war crimes court were pressing forward today with hearings against five men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks and a Canadian accused of killing a U.S. Soldier.

Several days of pretrial motions were scheduled to start a day before the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has said he will close the offshore prison at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

Lawyers and representatives of human rights groups who have come to observe the hearings believe Obama will suspend the military commission system created by Congress and President Bush in 2006 to prosecute dozens of men held at Guantanamo.

Many observers doubt the U.S. will go ahead with the Jan. 26 trial of Canadian Omar Khadr, who is accused of killing an American Soldier with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when the Toronto native was 15.

"This system is discredited and flawed and should not exist one day more, and certainly the signals that we hear from Washington, from the Obama transition team, are that he will act on it as soon as he is in office," said Jamil Dakwar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is in Guantanamo this week to observe the hearings.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/at-gitmo-hearings-as-usual.html?col=1186032310810