The Little Brown Reader

They would effectively be tried by a “kangaroo court”, stripped of all basic rights of due process that would be afforded in criminal courts in Britain or America, they said.

No charges have yet been levelled against Moazzem Begg from Birmingham or Feroz Abbasi from Croydon, although Pentagon lawyers are finalising the wording of the indictments.

Matthias Kelly, QC, chairman of the Bar of England and Wales, said that the proposed trials were “totally illegitimate and a violation of every rule in international law”.

He said: “The construction of execution chambers makes virtually every lawyer in the Western world extremely angry. The idea that there is an artificial creation or enclave which, according to the Americans, is beyond the purview of all recognised systems of law is repugnant.”

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Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has delegated to his deputy, the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz, the final decision on whether the prosecutions will proceed.

“There are a lot of checks and balances in this system,” one Pentagon spokesman told The Times. Asked what those checks and balances were, the official cited the review of the President’s decision by Mr Wolfowitz.