WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 (UPI) -- The American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday its officials will travel to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to observe U.S. military tribunals of detainees.
"Opening the tribunals to some public scrutiny is a step in the right direction, but granting the public limited access to the tribunals won't, by itself, solve the problems inherent with this system of second class justice," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a prepared statement. "The military tribunals are still an unaccountable system of justice. They lack any outside review, leaving them open to command influence and other problems."
The administration plans to use the commissions to try non-citizen "enemy combatants" held in the war on terrorism. The ACLU said the tribunals could easily be expanded to include non-citizens or even citizens on U.S. soil.
The ACLU said the review panels announced by the Defense Department of Defense in response to recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on indefinite detention deal only with whether detainees are "enemy combatants" and are entirely different from the commissions.
The commission rules have not been changed and do not afford "full and fair" trials, as promised by the president, the ACLU said.
