WASHINGTON — Four detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base who will face U.S. military commission proceedings next week are expected to claim that the government obtained confessions and other evidence through coercive techniques, including torture, Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday.
Defense attorneys are expected to cite statements by recently released detainees who have said they were physically abused and stripped of their clothing while being held at the detention facility in Cuba, commission officials said.
"I expect that defense lawyers who think that any of those statements are involuntary will argue that the statements shouldn't come in because it's not credible, because it was made involuntarily," said retired Army Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., who oversees the military commission process.
Altenburg said the four defendants each would be given a one-day preliminary hearing in the first U.S. military commission proceedings to take place since the end of World War II.
The four are the first of 15 detainees, out of a total of 585 Guantanamo prisoners, who have been singled out for trial by military commission by President Bush.
If detainees succeed in challenging evidence on the grounds it was obtained through widely criticized interrogation methods, it could affect the prosecution of other prisoners at Guantanamo. Even prisoners who do not claim they were subjected to torture could argue that they offered false confessions because they feared it, Altenburg said.
U.S. officials deny any abuse of Guantanamo detainees, who are held by the United States outside the protection of the Geneva Convention rules on treatment of prisoners.
Defense attorneys face problems in challenging coercive interrogations, said Neil Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor. He said there was no apparent rule requiring disclosure to defense counsel about instances of alleged torture or coercion. As a result, statements from other prisoners used as evidence could have been coerced, but attorneys would have no way of knowing it.
Katyal also said that Pentagon officials had not pledged that evidence obtained through coercion would be excluded, a break with civil trials and standard military court-martial proceedings.
"The reason it's excluded is so interrogators are not given an incentive to be coercive," Katyal said. "All Altenburg said is that it would be decided on a case-by-case basis, perhaps in secret. And that is clearly at odds with American military justice."
