Legal Challenges to Military Tribunals Could Tie Up Trial of 9/11 Suspects for Years

Civil rights lawyers are gearing themselves up for what one described as an "enormous fight" over the decision to put six al-Qaida suspects accused of organizing the 9/11 attacks on trial through Guantánamo's controversial system of military tribunals.

The first military defense lawyers are likely to be appointed by Friday, and the search will then begin for civilian lawyers qualified and willing to work alongside them. Legal experts expect the defense teams to challenge virtually every aspect of the prosecution, tying up proceedings for months or even years.

"This is a Pandora's box of horrors that make these trials fundamentally impossible to conduct in the way the US administration wants to do them," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents one of the six, the alleged 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani.

The Pentagon said on Monday that it was charging the six detainees, who also include the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and seeking the death penalty for all of them. The charges include terrorism, conspiracy, and murder in violation of the law of war.

They could be put on trial together within the next 120 days, though most expect the process to take much longer in the system of military commissions in which even the judge is appointed from the military.

The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, kicked off a round of diplomacy designed to assuage skeptical foreign allies when he told the BBC that the six would be afforded "all of the fundamental rights".

But civil rights lawyers are likely to begin by challenging the very system of military tribunals on the grounds that it denies the defendants the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Should that fail, lawyers will question the interrogation methods used to obtain evidence. It is known that coercive techniques were used on Mohammed and Qahtani.

Mohammed was water boarded - subjected to simulated drowning - while a log of Qahtani's interrogations was recorded that showed he was subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, extreme hot and cold, and sexual humiliation. The military commission system does not allow the use of evidence obtained from torture, but the US administration has not accepted that water boarding amounts to torture.

The system does allow the admissibility of evidence drawn from "coercion", such as sleep deprivation, as long as the military judge approves it.

Jim Cohen, a professor of law at Fordham University, New York, who represents other detainees at Guantánamo, said the prosecutions would soon be tied up in legal knots. "Everything that you can imagine being challenged will be challenged - the interrogation techniques, the viability of defendants' statements, the death penalty. This is going to become an unending series of challenges."

News of the charges brought a predictably impassioned response. The New York Daily News ran an editorial headlined Death Is Too Good. It said: "Justice is limited to only one punishment for the barbaric murderers who deserve far worse: death. Die, you bastards."

Hamilton Peterson, who lost his father and stepmother on United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post the death penalty was suitable. "I do not see how someone could view the death penalty as inappropriate for the murder of approximately 3,000 people."