The Navy lawyer for Osama bin Laden's driver argues in a Guantánamo military commissions motion that senior Pentagon officials are orchestrating war crimes prosecutions for the 2008 campaign.
The Pentagon declined Friday to address the defense allegations, noting that the issue is being litigated.
The brief filed Thursday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer directly challenged the integrity of President Bush's war court.
Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon at which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.
''We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,'' England is quoted as saying.
The quote is recounted by a disgruntled former Pentagon prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who quit the post five months ago, alleging political interference.
The Defense Department has steadfastly maintained that its war-time prosecution policy is fair, and affords accused terrorists extraordinary rights.
''We're not going to respond to every allegation that's made out there, especially now that these cases are in litigation. The trial process will surface the facts in these cases,'' said Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman.
``Leadership has always been extraordinarily careful to guard against any unlawful command influence.''
The defense brief quotes England in a list of examples of purported political interference, which Mizer argues renders impossible a fair trail for Salim Hamdan, 37.
It asks the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, to dismiss the case against Hamdan as an alleged 9/11 co-conspirator on the grounds that Bush administration leadership exercises ``unlawful command influence.''
Allred's next hearing at Guantánamo is May 30. Hamdan's lawyers have called Davis as a witness and said Friday they are leaving to the prosecutors to decide whether to call England in rebuttal.
An expert on military justice, attorney Eugene Fidell, said the Hamdan motion brings into sharp relief the problem of Pentagon appointees' supervisory relationship to the war court.
''It scrambles relationships that ought to be kept clear,'' said Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.
Fidell said the quote attributed to England is ``enough that you'd want to hold an evidentiary hearing about it, with live witnesses. It does strike me as disturbing for there to be even a whiff of political considerations in what should be a quasi-judicial determination.''
Hamdan is the former Afghanistan driver of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden whose lawyers challenged an earlier war court format to the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down the war court as unconstitutional.
Pentagon prosecutors call him a war criminal for chauffeuring bin Laden in Afghanistan before and at the time of the 9/11 attacks and for allegedly serving as his bodyguard. Even if he didn't help plot the suicide attacks, they argue, he is an al Qaeda co-conspirator.
As recounted in the brief, the England meeting came only three weeks after President Bush disclosed in a live address that he had ordered the CIA to transfer ''high-value detainees'' from years of secret custody to Guantánamo for trial.
England is a two-term Bush appointee. He joined the administration in 2001 as Navy secretary, briefly served as deputy Homeland Security secretary and then returned to the Pentagon, where he supervised prison camps administrative processes.
Added the Pentagon's Whitman: ``It has always been everybody's desire to move as swiftly and deliberately as possible to conduct military commissions.''
