Budget delays hamstring hiring at Justice Dept.

Crime-fighting agencies pinched

By Lara Jakes Jordan
Associated Press
January 13, 2007
The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- A hiring freeze has hit two federal crime-fighting agencies and a third has slowed its recruitment efforts because of congressional budget delays that some officials say threaten efforts to combat terrorism and violent crime.

Congress has yet to approve the Justice Department's 2007 spending request. Lawmakers are now negotiating how much -- if at all -- to increase government spending. In the meantime, the agencies are being funded according to last year's budget levels.

Agencies feeling the squeeze :

The Drug Enforcement Administration. Although more than 400 agents and support staff are expected to quit or retire this year, chief financial officer Frank Kalder said, the DEA might have to lose additional employees if Congress does not give it about $95 million more than it did in 2006.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ATF says it needs $71 million more than last year just to sustain its workforce of 4,900 employees.

The FBI. Recruiting and hiring has slowed since the budget year began on Oct. 1. The agency has stopped advertising for job openings on its website. Assistant Director John Miller said the bureau still is hiring agents, linguists, analysts, and other high-priority employees. The FBI employs about 12,600 agents and 18,000 support staff.

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Military Is Expanding Its Intelligence Role in U.S.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: January 14, 2007
The New York times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.

The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”

Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics — a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.

Government lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

Pentagon officials said they used the letters to follow up on a variety of intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.

Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help eliminate suspects.

“We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.

But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said. Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.

Some national security experts and civil liberties advocates are troubled by the C.I.A. and military taking on domestic intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of the military’s own guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of “force protection,” or efforts to guard military installations.

“There’s a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law enforcement,” said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at both the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. who is the dean at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. “They’re moving into territory where historically they have not been authorized or presumed to be operating.”

Similarly, John Radsan, an assistant general counsel at the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004 and now a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, said, “The C.I.A. is not supposed to have any law enforcement powers, or internal security functions, so if they’ve been issuing their own national security letters, they better be able to explain how they don’t cross the line.”

The Pentagon’s expanded intelligence-gathering role, in particular, has created occasional conflicts with other federal agencies. Pentagon efforts to post American military officers at embassies overseas to gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations or future war plans has rankled some State Department and C.I.A. officials, who see the military teams as duplicating and potentially interfering with the intelligence agency.

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has complained about military officials dealing directly with local police — rather than through the bureau — for assistance in responding to possible terrorist threats against a military base. F.B.I. officials say the threats have often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless anxiety.

The military’s frequent use of national security letters has sometimes caused concerns from the businesses receiving them, a counterterrorism official said. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide records to the F.B.I. in law enforcement investigations, have contacted bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military’s requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over, the official said.

Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about customers to the government, the official said, “so the more this is done, and the more poorly it’s done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I.”

The bureau has frequently relied on the letters in recent years to gather telephone and Internet logs, financial information and other records in terrorism investigations, serving more than 9,000 letters in 2005, according to a Justice Department tally. As an investigative tool, the letters present relatively few hurdles; they can be authorized by supervisors rather than a court. Passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 lowered the standard for issuing the letters, requiring only that the documents sought be “relevant” to an investigation and allowing records requests for more peripheral figures, not just targets of an inquiry.

Some Democrats have accused the F.B.I. of using the letters for fishing expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice Department inspector general to study the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, a review that is continuing.

Unlike the F.B.I., the military and the C.I.A. do not have wide-ranging authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence investigations. But the expanded use of national security letters has allowed the Pentagon and the intelligence agency to collect records on their own. Sometimes, military or C.I.A. officials work with the F.B.I. to seek records, as occurred with an American translator who had worked for the military in Iraq and was suspected of having ties to insurgents.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a senior Defense Department official said.

Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.

The Patriot Act does not specifically mention military intelligence or C.I.A. officials in connection with the national security letters.

Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon’s interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. “It was a very broad reading of the law,” a former counterterrorism official said.

While the letters typically have been used to trace the financial transactions of military personnel, they also have been used to investigate civilian contractors and people with no military ties who may pose a threat to the military, officials said. Military officials say they regard the letters as one of the least intrusive means to gather evidence. When a full investigation is opened, one official said, it has now become “standard practice” to issue such letters.

One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records, according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James J. Yee, soon collapsed.

Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue the letters.

Mr. Fidell said he found the practice “disturbing,” in part because the military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to Americans’ civil rights as does the F.B.I. “Where is the accountability?” he asked. “That’s the evil of it — it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”

Even when a case is closed, military officials said they generally maintain the records for years because they may be relevant to future intelligence inquiries. Officials at the Pentagon’s counterintelligence unit say they plan to incorporate those records into a database, called Portico, on intelligence leads. The financial documents will not be widely disseminated, but limited to investigators, an intelligence official said.

“You don’t want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy comes up in another report and you don’t know that he was investigated before,” the official said.

The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better coordinate the military’s efforts to combat foreign intelligence services, has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.

The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. The Defense Department has since tightened its procedures for what kind of information is allowed into the Talon database, and the counterintelligence office also purged more than 250 incident reports from the database that officials determined should never have been included because they centered on lawful political protests by people opposed to the war in Iraq.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a senior Defense Department official said.

Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.

The Patriot Act does not specifically mention military intelligence or C.I.A. officials in connection with the national security letters.

Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon’s interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. “It was a very broad reading of the law,” a former counterterrorism official said.

While the letters typically have been used to trace the financial transactions of military personnel, they also have been used to investigate civilian contractors and people with no military ties who may pose a threat to the military, officials said. Military officials say they regard the letters as one of the least intrusive means to gather evidence. When a full investigation is opened, one official said, it has now become “standard practice” to issue such letters.

One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records, according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James J. Yee, soon collapsed.

Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue the letters.

Mr. Fidell said he found the practice “disturbing,” in part because the military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to Americans’ civil rights as does the F.B.I. “Where is the accountability?” he asked. “That’s the evil of it — it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”

Even when a case is closed, military officials said they generally maintain the records for years because they may be relevant to future intelligence inquiries. Officials at the Pentagon’s counterintelligence unit say they plan to incorporate those records into a database, called Portico, on intelligence leads. The financial documents will not be widely disseminated, but limited to investigators, an intelligence official said.

“You don’t want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy comes up in another report and you don’t know that he was investigated before,” the official said.

The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better coordinate the military’s efforts to combat foreign intelligence services, has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.

The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. The Defense Department has since tightened its procedures for what kind of information is allowed into the Talon database, and the counterintelligence office also purged more than 250 incident reports from the database that officials determined should never have been included because they centered on lawful political protests by people opposed to the war in Iraq.

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Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees

By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: January 13, 2007
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had no problem with the current system of representation. “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases,” he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson’s view. His comments “do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,” a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to be used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke. Mr. Stimson did not return a call on Friday seeking comment.

The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantánamo prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a secret and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast their efforts in a favorable light. Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based human rights group that is coordinating the legal representation for the Guantánamo detainees, said about 500 lawyers from about 120 law firms had volunteered their services to represent Guantánamo prisoners.

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the approximately 500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is being paid, Mr. Ratner said. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling, which has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Mr. Ratner said that there were two other defense lawyers not under his group’s umbrella and that he did not know whether they were paid.

Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton who represented an Uzbeki detainee who has since been released, said: “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel. Any suggestion that our representation was anything other than a pro bono basis is untrue and unprofessional.” Mr. Moore said he had made four trips to Guantánamo and one to Albania at the firm’s expense, to see his client freed.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to President Bush on Friday asking him to disavow Mr. Stimson’s remarks.

Mr. Stimson, who was a Navy lawyer, graduated from George Mason University Law School. In a 2006 interview with the magazine of Kenyon College, his alma mater, Mr. Stimson said that he was learning “to choose my words carefully because I am a public figure on a very, very controversial topic.”

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Military Eases Its Rules for Mobilizing Reserves

By DAVID S. CLOUD

Published: January 12, 2007
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 — The Pentagon announced steps Thursday to make more reservists available for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan by changing the policies that govern how often members of the Army National Guard and Reserve can be mobilized.

The new rules mean that individual Guard members and entire units that have already been deployed in the last five years may be called up again for as long as 24 consecutive months, officials said. In practice, the Pentagon intends to try to limit future mobilizations to no more than a year, once every five years, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters.

The policy change was brought on by the prolonged American troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military officials said it would have been necessary even if President Bush had not decided to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

The change, announced by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at a White House news conference, will enable the Bush administration to call up tens of thousands of Guard members who were off limits under the previous rules, without having to issue another politically delicate mobilization order.

The decision to send five active-duty combat brigades to Iraq in the next few months means the Army will need to call up National Guard combat brigades that have already done one-year tours in Iraq, and to do so sooner, officials said.

A senior military official said that by "this time next year," the Pentagon "probably will be calling again on Guard units that have previously done combat tours."

General Pace told reporters that some of the Guard units “that will be mobilized in the coming period will not have had five years since their last mobilization.” Some, he said, will have been home for four years and some for only three.

Until now, the Defense Department’s policy on employing Guard and Reserve units was that soldiers’ time on active duty could not exceed a cumulative total of 24 months in any five-year period. Under the new rules, the cumulative limit is removed.

The result, officials said, is that soldiers who have already done a tour in Iraq in the last five years can now be sent back to Iraq if their entire unit is remobilized. The goal of limiting deployments to a year is meant to offset the burden on Guard members, who must leave civilian jobs to serve.

Until now, many members of the Army National Guard, which has an authorized total strength of 350,000 soldiers, have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan as individuals, sometimes for 18 months or longer. Mr. Gates said the Pentagon would now mobilize units, not individuals. Any soldiers who have already done tours will again be eligible, regardless of previous deployments, if their units are called into service.

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For Guantánamo Review Boards, Limits Abound

By TIM GOLDEN
Published: December 31, 2006
The New York Times

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — At one end of a converted trailer in the American military detention center here, a graying Pakistani businessman sat shackled before a review board of uniformed officers, pleading for his freedom.

The prisoner had seen just a brief summary of what officials said was a thick dossier of intelligence linking him to Al Qaeda. He had not seen his own legal papers since they were taken away in an unrelated investigation. He has lawyers working on his behalf in Washington, London and Pakistan, but here his only assistance came from an Army lieutenant colonel, who stumbled as he read the prisoner’s handwritten statement.

As the hearing concluded, the detainee, who cannot be identified publicly under military rules, had a question. He is a citizen of Pakistan, he noted. He was arrested on a business trip to Thailand. On what authority or charges was he even being held?

“That question,” a Marine colonel presiding over the panel answered, “is outside the limits of what this board is permitted to consider.”

Under a law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in October, this double-wide trailer may be as close to a courtroom as most Guantánamo prisoners ever get. The law prohibits them from challenging their detention or treatment by writs of habeas corpus in the federal courts. Instead, they may only petition a single federal appeals court to examine whether the review boards followed the military’s own procedures in reviewing their status as “enemy combatants.”

But an examination of the Guantánamo review boards by The New York Times suggests that they have often fallen short, not only as a source of due process for the hundreds of men held here, but also as a forum to resolve questions about what the detainees have done and the threats they may pose.

Some limitations have long been evident. The prisoners have no right to a lawyer, or to see classified evidence, or even to know the identity of their accusers. What has been less visible, however, is what many officials describe as a continuing shortage of information about many detainees, including some who have been held on sketchy or disputed intelligence.

Behind the hearings that journalists are allowed to observe is a system that has at times been as long on government infighting and diplomatic maneuvering as it has been short on hard evidence. The result, current and former officials acknowledged, is that some detainees have been held for years on less compelling information, while a growing number of others for whom there was thought to be stronger evidence of militant activities have been released under secret arrangements between Washington and their home governments.

Military officials emphasize that the boards are an administrative forum and were never intended to replicate judicial standards of fairness. But they say the hearings offer prisoners a viable opportunity to rebut the government’s evidence.

“At the end of the day, it’s about giving the detainee the flexibility and freedom to present his case,” said Capt. Philip L. Waddingham, a former Navy pilot who oversees the operations of the panels at Guantánamo.

Administration officials also emphasize that the reviews are more rigorous than the battlefield tribunals that have traditionally been used to determine the status of wartime prisoners under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

But the Geneva tribunals were established to answer questions about the identities of soldiers and spies from regular armies. Sorting through the identities and past actions of suspected participants in a shadowy global terrorist network, military officials said, has proved far more complex.

To date, 377 Guantánamo detainees, nearly half of the 773 who have been held there, have been released or transferred to other governments. Of those, about 150 have been repatriated through the review process since mid-2004, officials said.

The administration’s push to reduce the Guantánamo population is more evident in another statistic. The final arbiter of prisoner releases, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, has overruled the panels’ recommendations in more than 15 percent of the 237 cases he has decided so far this year, officials said. In virtually all of those, the boards had recommended continued detention.

Still, a recent study of the review process found that detainees arguing their innocence were routinely denied witnesses they tried to call, even when the witnesses were other prisoners at Guantánamo. Lawyers for the detainees complain that the government has made almost no effort to have the panels consider information they have gathered and has often blocked their attempts to learn the accusations against their clients.

“We have tried again and again to have a say in the process,” said Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer who has coordinated much of the work of the detainees’ lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But we learned pretty early on that these were kangaroo courts.”

Many of the detainees appear to have given up on the reviews as a way to win their freedom. In the latest round of annual hearings, which were completed this month, only 18 percent of the prisoners chose to attend.

Evolution of the Hearings

The review system at Guantánamo began operating in July 2004, more than two years after most detainees were imprisoned there. Officials said it was intended in part to deflect criticism that the prison had become a legal black hole. They also hoped it would resolve what had become a contentious struggle among national security agencies over which prisoners to hold and which to free.

Even before Mr. Bush decided in February 2002 that the United States would not observe the Geneva Conventions in fighting terrorism, Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, dismissed the idea of Geneva-style hearings for the detainees, maintaining that they would never be entitled to the prisoner-of-war status that such tribunals could grant them in other conflicts.

“There is no ambiguity in this case,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Yet intelligence officers at Guantánamo found ambiguity everywhere. Many of the detainees had been captured by Afghan militias, Pakistani border guards and other surrogates, and some had been turned in for bounties, intelligence officials said. Information about their identities and actions was often vague and secondhand. Physical evidence, if any existed, was sometimes lost before reaching Cuba.

Still, the detainees who were held on the weakest information tended not to be a priority for either intelligence officers or the military’s criminal investigators.

“It wasn’t the job of the intelligence community to verify their guilt or innocence,” said Col. Brittain P. Mallow, a retired Army investigator who led a task force that gathered evidence for war crimes tribunals that are expected to prosecute about 50 to 70 of the remaining 396 detainees.

Faced with growing international criticism, the Bush administration moved in May 2004 to set up a kind of annual parole system, called Administrative Review Boards, to weigh each detainee’s continuing threat and intelligence value. But before those hearings began, the Supreme Court called that June for a one-time review of all Guantánamo detainees using the sort of panels called for by Army regulations — and by the Geneva Conventions.

Those first panels, called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s in military parlance, required three military officers to decide cases by majority vote, based on a “preponderance of the evidence.” The boards were allowed to consider a wide range of intelligence, including statements obtained by coercion.

Midlevel officers were assigned to help the detainees prepare for their hearings. Military lawyers were not permitted to serve in that role, however, because of concern that limitations on that assistance might open the lawyers to charges of violating professional ethics rules.

Lawyers at the Defense and Justice Departments had another worry: that detainees found to be “not enemy combatants” might sue the government for wrongful imprisonment. Partly for that reason, officials said, the review office was instructed to use the phrase “no longer enemy combatants.”

By the time the C.S.R.T. reviews got under way, intelligence agencies had confirmed that half a dozen detainees released from Guantánamo were fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Such risks were raised frequently in government debates.

“It was sort of a mantra in the system: ‘You have got to make sure that you don’t release any of the wrong people,’ ” recalled Charles W. Moore Jr., a now-retired vice admiral who set up the review apparatus under Mr. England.

Reviewing Decisions

The early results of the hearings, in which officials said a surprising number of detainees were found not to be enemy combatants, only heightened the unease.

Internal critics, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Special Operations branch of the Pentagon, complained heatedly that the boards did not properly understand the intelligence they were assessing, said current and former officials who participated in the debates.

The critics were later allowed to provide further training to the panels. In the first round of annual reviews after the C.S.R.T.’s, officers with military intelligence backgrounds also took over the role, previously assigned to lawyers, of vetting evidence and presenting the government’s case.

While some officials perceived an undue influence over the panels from intelligence agencies and their allies, others said those critics were mostly beaten back.

“The intelligence community wanted to derail the C.S.R.T. process and dictate the decisions, and that didn’t happen,” said one former senior official, who, like several others, would discuss the policy deliberations only on the condition of anonymity.

According to documents and interviews, the Pentagon office in charge of the reviews ordered the repetition of some C.S.R.T. boards that recommended the release of detainees. Defense Department officials would not discuss those cases in detail.

The largest number of repeated hearings appears to have involved some of the 22 Muslim detainees from western China who were part of the Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) ethnic minority.

The Uighurs’ sworn enemy was not the United States but the Communist government of China, which had long oppressed their people. The military accused the detainees of belonging to a separatist group that the Chinese authorities had persuaded Washington to list as a terrorist organization, but some experts on the region disputed that characterization of the group and the detainees denied any link to it.

The State Department, fearful that the men would be tortured if they were sent back to China, had already begun trying to place the Uighurs as refugees in Europe when their cases came for review at Guantánamo, officials said.

“We were shocked that they even sent those guys before the C.S.R.T.’s,” said one former national security official who worked on the matter. “They had already been identified for release.”

Because the Uighurs told very similar stories, Pentagon officials were confounded when at least five of them were determined not to be enemy combatants and the rest properly held, officials said.

At least several of the Uighurs, including some found not to be enemy combatants, had their cases reviewed again, officials said. They described the impetus for doing so as “quality control.” But available documents show that at least one of the detainees, whose case was reviewed again, was finally found to be an enemy combatant.

Five Uighur detainees were finally sent to Albania as refugees in May.

Some Aren’t Revisited

Yet other cases in which questions arose were not revisited. One of those involved a Sudanese man, Adel Hassan Hamad, who was seized in Pakistan in 2002.

According to the unclassified summary of allegations in his first hearing, Mr. Hamad, who is now about 48, had worked for two nongovernmental organizations, or N.G.O.’s, with ties to Al Qaeda and had come into contact “with persons who had positions of responsibility in Al Qaeda.” But the military presented no unclassified information that Mr. Hamad was anything but a hospital administrator and former teacher, or that he knew of his employers’ purported ties.

As with all such cases, it is not possible to judge independently the evidence against Mr. Hamad because part of it is secret. But while two panel members found him to be rightfully detained, a third officer, an Army lawyer whose name was blacked out in the declassified document, objected strongly.

Even if the unclassified allegations were true — and Mr. Hamad said he knew nothing about Qaeda links — “a mere association with Al Qaeda does not qualify as a basis for enemy combatant status,” the lawyer wrote in a formal dissent. The officer, who also studied the secret evidence, said the military was declaring Mr. Hamad an enemy combatant because some parts of the organization he worked for had allegedly supported “terrorist ideals and causes.”

“To reach such a conclusion would provide for unconscionable results,” he wrote. It might mean, he added, that “all physicians, nurses and aid workers employed by the alleged terrorist-connected N.G.O.’s would also be declared enemy combatants.”

The panel’s 2-to-1 decision was reviewed by two other military lawyers, each of whom tersely upheld its “legal sufficiency.” One of them, Cmdr. James R. Crisfield Jr. of the Navy, described the Army officer’s dissent as “articulate and thoughtful,” but emphasized the review panels’ modest standard of proof.

“Given the low evidentiary hurdle posed by a preponderance-of-evidence standard and the rebuttable presumption of genuineness and accuracy that attaches to government evidence, I believe that the test is satisfied in this case,” Commander Crisfield wrote.

Despite the limited evidence against Mr. Hamad, documents from his first annual review show little further substance to the military’s accusations. They noted that a brother of the Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was once a manager at one of the charities where Mr. Hamad worked. But the military was now asserting only that the group “may be affiliated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda operations.”

Two federal public defenders in Portland, Ore., who took Mr. Hamad’s case last year said they had located about a dozen witnesses who corroborated parts of his account. Although much of that information has been filed as part of a habeas case in federal court, there is no sign yet that it has made any difference for Mr. Hamad.

“I don’t think there was any substantive attempt by the military to find witnesses who could get to the bottom of this,” said one of the lawyers, Patrick J. Ehlers. “There were hundreds of other people out there who worked for these groups. None of those people were arrested, and none of them were questioned.”

Constraints on the System

Several officials who helped establish the review panels said they tried to create mechanisms that would let detainees present witnesses and evidence and allow the panels to gather new information.

But some officials said those ambitions, however sincere, had often been undone by the speed of most reviews — often conducted in just hours — and the low priority assigned to the collection of information on the detainees by intelligence agencies and foreign governments. This year, three panels at Guantánamo handled as many as 13 or 14 cases a week, they said.

“There are real time constraints and real resource constraints,” one retired military officer said. “They usually ended up without anything new, so the boards were just dusting off old files and trying to have a fair and impartial body look at that old information.”

Captain Waddingham, the chief of the review office at Guantánamo, said the boards followed the recommendations of military intelligence officials 95 percent of the time. But both he and the overall head of the review program, Frank Sweigart, insisted that the panels were able to get new information when they needed it.

“We are always looking for supporting facts, and if we can’t find them, we ask for them,” Mr. Sweigart, a retired Navy captain, said in an interview. “There really is a lot of information out there for a number of them — especially for the detainees who are there today.”

But other current and former officials described a system that was frequently inefficient in collecting information that might determine a prisoner’s fate.

Some officials said military and civilian intelligence agencies gave little priority to requests for information from the panels, particularly when they involved time-consuming inquiries overseas. And though officials including Mr. England, the deputy defense secretary, have urged foreign governments to develop and pass on their own information about detainees from their countries, few of them did.

Officials said some governments, including those of Kuwait and Bahrain, had provided extensive files on their detainees. Partly out of diplomatic considerations, they said, the State Department pressed Mr. England to move up review hearings for at least several detainees from those two countries and, ultimately, to overrule review panel decisions and repatriate them.

On Nov. 3 last year, the Pentagon sent two Kuwaitis and three Bahrainis home from Guantánamo on Mr. England’s approval, despite what two officials said had been negative rulings by the review panels in at least some of those cases.

But other releases are harder to explain. In one such case, lawyers for Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan prisoner, said they were mystified to learn of the repatriation on Dec. 16 of another Afghan, Mohammad Akhtiar, after his annual review.

Mr. Akhtiar had been accused of launching a rocket attack on an American military base in Afghanistan in early 2003. Declassified transcripts of Mr. Gul’s hearings suggest that a major piece of incriminating evidence against him was that he was captured with Mr. Akhtiar at his home. (Another problem seemed to be that he was confused with another Afghan with the same name, who is also being held at Guantánamo.)

“Gul’s greatest sin seemed to be his association with Mohammad Akhtiar,” said a lawyer for Mr. Gul, Amy Baggio. “Unfathomably, Akhtiar is now home with his family while Nazar Gul is going on his fourth year in custody.”

Lawyers say that detainees who have tried to use the review system to challenge the accusations against them have often been frustrated. According to a recent study of 102 unclassified C.S.R.T. files by the Seton Hall University law school, the military denied all requests by the detainees for witnesses who were not also being held at Guantánamo and denied requests for detainee witnesses 74 percent of the time.

Although a growing number of lawyers have begun to conduct their own investigations into accusations against their clients, a former military intelligence officer who has presided over dozens of review boards was dismissive of those contributions.

“As far as what the habeas lawyers have to say, for the most part it wouldn’t factor in because they have made themselves not credible,” said the officer, a Marine colonel who suggested that the lawyers took detainees’ claims of innocence at face value.

The lawyers respond that the obstacles to their input in the process raise questions about the military’s desire to learn everything it can about the detainees. More than a week after the hearing for the Pakistani businessman accused of ties to Al Qaeda, a Washington lawyer who had been trying to help him told a reporter that he had not even known the session had taken place.

“There is no hint of any kind of due process in this,” said the lawyer, Gaillard T. Hunt. “He’s got no right to an investigation. But substantively, it really doesn’t matter, because they can always just say they have this classified information that he can’t see.”

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