WASHINGTON -- The chief of the Pentagon war court has spurned a defense request for delay and ordered a Military Commission hearing that will address the issue of torture to go forward after Memorial Day at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a document obtained by The Miami Herald.

Army Col. James Pohl, the judge, wrote in the two-page ruling Thursday that defense lawyers had ample notice to prepare for the one-day hearing May 27. He ordered them to make plans to travel to the remote base in southeast Cuba for the first commission session since President Barack Obama took office and got a 120-day freeze in the war court proceedings.

At issue at the hearing for Saudi Arabian Ahmed Darbi, 34, is how much evidence might be presented at his military trial in a bid to show the man was tortured into confessing crimes he now denies.

The Defense Department says Darbi is the brother-in-law of one of the men on the suicide squad that forced hijacked Flight 77 into the Pentagon building on Sept. 11, 2001, although he is not accused in that crime. His charge sheet alleges he conspired with al Qaeda in a never-realized 2000-2002 plot to bomb vessels at sea in the Straits of Hormuz. He also allegedly met Osama bin Laden and trained in an Afghan al Qaeda camp.

Defense lawyers had earlier asked to submit the award-winning documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side and Torturing Democracy into the court record.

The timing is particularly sensitive because both The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported, citing administration sources, that the new government is looking at ways of tweaking the war court system to provide greater protections to the accused, to possibly include exclusion of evidence obtained through coercion.

Judge Pohl called the hearing a necessary prelude to a trial, and said he was opposed to an additional delay. Earlier this year the judge took the timing issue in a different case to the brink of conflict with the Obama administration over the requested delay to study the war court procedures and protections.

Neither Pentagon nor Military Commission spokesmen responded to repeated requests for comment on whether the hearing would go forward May 27. Also unanswered was whether the Obama administration would continue a Bush era practice of airlifting reporters to the unadorned war court compound called Camp Justice, to permit news coverage of the hearing.

To avert that earlier hearing, the Pentagon withdrew the death penalty charges against another Guantánamo captive, Abd el Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi who could still face future trial for his alleged role in the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole destroyer off Yemen. Seventeen sailors died in that attack.

Darbi's lawyers are trying to prevent Pentagon prosecutors from using as trial evidence dozens of the Saudi's self-incriminating statements, which they claim were obtained through brutal treatment during interrogations at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, before he was moved to Guantánamo. The two films include guards describing a climate of abuse at the time of his interrogations.

War court advocates say it is up to the judge to decide whether a confession was obtained through coercion, and whether it should be admissible at trial.

At his last war court hearing, on Dec. 15, a soft-spoken Darbi suddenly held up a copy of Obama's campaign promise to close down the prison camps at Guantánamo and urged the president-elect to deliver on his pledge, which he said would restore U.S. credibility around the world.

Defense lawyer Ramzi Kassem said in a statement that the Pentagon should, like in the Nashiri case, withdraw the Darbi charges without prejudice to give the new leadership time to decide how to proceed.

``It would be tragic for Mr. Darbi's case to proceed based solely on evidence obtained through outrageous coercion and before the same Military Commission that President Obama pledged to shut down because it permitted such evidence,''Kassem said.

Going forward on May 27, the lawyer said, ``would effectively take out of President Obama's hands a major policy determination: whether to pursue proceedings in the Military Commissions created under President Bush.''

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