By David Morgan WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - The Bush administration faced pressure on Tuesday to overhaul how it brings foreign terrorism suspects to trial after the surprise dismissal of war crimes charges against two prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. With only days to appeal, the White House said it disagreed with the separate rulings by U.S. military judges on Monday and denied it had suffered another setback after being forced by the Supreme Court to change the system just last year. Advocates for the detainees hailed the decisions as a watershed that would unleash legal challenges to the 2006 U.S. law that established the current military tribunal system. The rulings do not affect U.S. authority to indefinitely hold about 380 foreign suspects at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeast Cuba, a source of criticism over how the United States is prosecuting the war on terror. But advocates and lawmakers in Congress said it was time to restore the rights of the prisoners to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, which Congress revoked last year. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on the White House to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to craft a new legal framework for the tribunals. "The place to start is by restoring the hallmark of justice known as the great writ of habeas corpus," Leahy said. The military judges dropped all war crimes charges against the only two Guantanamo prisoners facing trial -- Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen. Hamdan, an accused driver and guard for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, won a Supreme Court challenge last year that scrapped the first Guantanamo tribunal system and prompted Congress to create the new system. The judges in the Hamdan and Khadr cases said they lacked jurisdiction because the defendants were classified as "enemy combatants" rather than "unlawful enemy combatants," as required by the system set in place by Congress. The judges gave the Bush administration 72 hours to decide on an appeal. But the court authorized to hear appeals under the new system has yet to be created, said the chief defense counsel for the tribunals, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan. "We don't agree with the ruling," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters in Prague, where President George W. Bush was meeting with leaders of the Czech Republic. "In no way does this decision affect the appropriateness of the military commission system." INDICTMENT OR OVERREACTION? Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the rulings showed "a certain amount of judicial independence" while reiterating the Defense Department's conviction that the two detainees were eligible for trial. But Zachary Katznelson of the British-based legal charity, Reprieve, which represents 37 detainees at Guantanamo, said his group would push for the Supreme Court to examine the Military Commission Act of 2006 that created the new system. "It shows they can't even get the show trials right," Katznelson told Reuters in a telephone interview. Jumana Musa of Amnesty International, who attended Monday's proceedings as an observer, said the rulings amounted to an indictment of U.S. policy on detainees. But some analysts said no new congressional action was necessary because Monday's rulings only required Defense Secretary Robert Gates to make administrative changes to allow the detainees to be designated as "unlawful enemy combatants." "Some appear to be overreacting to what the judges held," said Scott Silliman of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. Many military lawyers have argued for years that the United States should scrap the tribunals and conduct the trials in the court-martial system, where the rules are clear and legal landmarks are long-established. "The military judges are capable of doing good work if we go back to the system that's tried and true, the court-martial," said Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift. "The government should have seen that argument coming a long way away," Swift said. "That shows what happens when you throw together legislation, throwing out all the past precedents and try to get it done quick and dirty." (Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Prague, Jane Sutton at the Guantanamo U.S. naval base, Andrew Gray in Washington and Mark Trevelyan in London)
