4 Guantanamo inmates expected to challenge interrogations

Altenburg said each of the four defendants will be given a one-day preliminary hearing in the first US 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 many other prisoners at Guantanamo. Even prisoners who do not claim they were tortured could argue that they offered false confessions because they feared it, Altenburg said.

US 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 is 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 detainees are David Hicks, an Australian, and three Al Qaeda suspects from Yemen and Sudan. Hicks is accused of conspiring to commit war crimes and attempted murder. The other three detainees are Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, allegedly a driver and security guard for Osama bin Laden, charged with conspiring to commit murder and attacks on civilians; Ali Hamza Ahamad Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan both are bin Laden bodyguards accused of conspiring to commit war crimes.