Judge: Man In Gitmo Despite Proof

A federal judge has criticized a secret military tribunal for keeping a German national jailed in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely based on a flimsy unsigned memo, despite information suggesting he had no terror ties, the Washington Post reports.

In a declassified portions of a January ruling obtained by the Post, the judge criticized the panel for ignoring the conclusions of U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities, in nearly 100 pages of documents, that Murat Kurnaz has no terrorist links.

The panel instead based its decision on a brief, unsupported memo filed just before Kurnaz's hearing by an unnamed government official.

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green wrote the memo "fails to provide significant details to support its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the sources for its information and is contradicted by other evidence in the record." The judge reviewed all the classified evidence in the case.

The Kurnaz case may be the first in which classified material considered by the military tribunals that keep detainees in the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has become public, the Post reports.

The military is considering changing the tribunals to strengthen defendants' rights, allow for more independent judges and bar confessions obtained by torture, officials tell the New York Times.

However, Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff oppose changing the tribunal rules unless forced to do so by the courts, the officials said.

Judge Green ruled in January that the tribunal and the procedures that support it simply don't go far enough toward protecting the rights of detainees.

The men deserve to know more about the charges against them, more help from attorneys, and deserve to be able to mount a reasonable challenge to allegations against them, she ruled.