The Pentagon has dropped three members of a military tribunal that will hear the trials of Guantanamo prisoners but has kept the presiding officer despite challenges to his impartiality.
The move marks the latest controversy in the tribunals, authorised by President George W. Bush following the 2001 attacks on the United States but criticised by human rights groups and some military lawyers as fundamentally unfair to defendants.
Instead of holding trials before a five-member panel of military officers with one alternate, trials will proceed with just three panel members for Mr David Hicks of Australia and Mr Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, said a Pentagon spokesman.
Mr John Altenburg, the Pentagon official overseeing the trial process, declined to get rid of the presiding officer, Army Colonel Peter Brownback, who has been criticised by military defense lawyers and prosecutors, a Pentagon spokesman said.
The Pentagon did not immediate provide Mr Altenburg's reasoning for eliminating the three panel members, and did not identify the officers.
Hearings in those cases will be held as scheduled on November 1st at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said.
These trials before a panel of officers, formally called a military commission, are the first such proceedings since World War Two. Mr Hamdan is accused of serving as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Mr Hicks is accused of fighting for al-Qaeda.
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, Mr Hamdan's military lawyer, said Pentagon officials continued to make up the rules as they go along.
Mr Swift noted with a three-member panel rather than five, prosecutors now need only two rather than four panel members to get the two-thirds necessary to convict. "They made it easier for themselves."