Obama orders 120-day halt at Guantánamo

In one of its first actions, the Obama administration late Tuesday instructed military prosecutors to seek a 120-day halt of legal proceedings involving detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base — a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

By The Washington Post and The Associated Press

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In one of its first actions, the Obama administration late Tuesday instructed military prosecutors to seek a 120-day halt of legal proceedings involving detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base — a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court handling the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks. The motion called for "a continuance of the proceedings" until May 20 so that "the newly inaugurated president and his administration (can) review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically."

The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume today, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.

Such a request may not be automatically granted by military judges, and not all defense attorneys may agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration's war on terror, and its unyielding attitude to foreign and domestic critics.

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