Guantanamo Judge Dismissed

Top military officials provided no explanation for why they dismissed the judge presiding over a key case at Guantanamo Bay.

The Miami Herald reports that the colonel presiding over the case had issued some rulings in favor of the defendant, Canadian national Omar Khadr.

Khadr's case has been on track to be one of the first to trial at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr, the son of an alleged al Qaeda financier, is accused of throwing a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. Special Forces soldier.
Military prosecutors had been pressing Brownback to set a trial date, but he has repeatedly directed them first to satisfy defense requests for access to potential evidence. At a hearing earlier this month, he threatened to suspend the proceedings altogether unless the detention center provided records of Khadr's confinement.

Kuebler said he believed the U.S. military is anxious for the trial to start before political pressure leads Canada to demand Khadr's repatriation.

Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement describing the abrupt change without explanation as evidence that the war court, created by Congress in 2006, is ``fundamentally flawed.''

9/11 trial sought during presidential campaign

Defense lawyers for the alleged 9/11 conspirators on Thursday accused the Pentagon prosecutor of rushing to begin the complex Sept. 11, 2001, mass-murder trial in the height of the presidential campaign season.

The U.S. military attorneys included the claim in a 20-page brief asking the military judge to dismiss the capital charges against alleged al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees.

The document includes an e-mail from a civilian member of the prosecution team proposing to set the trial date for Sept. 15, the Monday after the seventh anniversary of the suicide attacks.

''Not coincidentally,'' the defense attorneys say, ``that would force the trial of this case in mid-September, some seven weeks before the general elections.''

The date, in fact, is 10 days after Sen. John McCain, an architect of Military Commissions law, is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the GOP national convention in St. Paul, Minn.

''Three months and 18 days is not enough time to prepare a defense in this death penalty case even if the government had provided the defense with the attorneys, resources, and facilities necessary to do so,'' said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, attorney for Ammar al Baluchi, who is also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

A Pentagon spokesman denied the trial schedule was linked to the national political campaign season. ''We're moving forward with the trials,'' said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. ``And we're going to continue with the process.''

DEVELOPMENTS

In other signs of the drive to get more cases to trial this year:

• The Defense Department on Thursday issued preliminary conspiracy charges against three alleged al Qaeda bomb-makers -- two Saudis and an Algerian -- raising the total number of currently active prosecutions to 17. Sufiyan Barhoumi, Jibran Qahtani and Ghassan Sharbi, long-held Guantánamo detainees, face maximum life sentences, if convicted.

• The military replaced an Army judge who had threatened to suspend the commission trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr, until the prison camps at Guantánamo release Khadr's health records to defense attorneys. Military commissions sources had earlier indicated that the judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III, was weighing his retirement.

By law, U.S.-held detainees charged at the war court must be tried within 120 days of finalization of charges -- unless the defense team is granted a delay.

All five men in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror-attack case face possible execution, if convicted. Civilian and military criminal defense lawyers have predicted it will take a year to prepare, in part because it's a death-penalty case and classified information is being used.

DEFENSE CLAIMS

Defense lawyers have claimed for some time that the Pentagon is rushing to trial before President Bush leaves the White House in January, or cited alleged internal debates by appointees about whether charges could be brought for political gain or to capture the imagination of the American people.

The latest brief raises the allegations a notch a week before the five men go before a military judge for their arraignment, or official reading of charges.

The Pentagon is organizing for large-scale coverage of the first-ever appearances of the former CIA-held captives.

It has invited 60 national and international journalists to be airlifted to Guantánamo from Andrews Air Force Base a day ahead of the trial date and then taken back to the Washington Beltway the next day.

Amnesty: Time to call time on Guantánamo

Amnesty International today called for Guantánamo Bay to be shut by the end of the year.

The human rights organisation's secretary general, Irene Khan, said she hoped the next US president would announce its closure on December 10 - the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"It would be a great occasion for the new US president to announce the closure of Guantánamo on that day," she said.

As the charity published its annual report, Khan said all three presidential candidates had pledged to shut down Guantánamo Bay.

She also accused western governments of failing to do enough to tackle human rights abuses.

The organisation's annual checklist of human rights outrages showed people were still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries.

Men and women also faced unfair trials in at least 54 countries and were denied free speech in at least 77, the report said.

"The reason why the Amnesty International report highlights the role of the United States is because the US is the world's superpower and as such its performance sets the standard for other governments around the world," Khan said.

"That's why we have high expectations that the new US president will set a new direction that the US will engage positively with human rights and will begin first by setting its own house in order."

Amnesty challenged world leaders to "apologise for six decades of human rights failure" and to make a new commitment to work for improvements.

The report renewed criticism of the UK for its policy of deportations to unstable countries, secret terror hearings and failing to fully investigate alleged state collusion in killings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

"We would like the British government to correct its own approaches on control orders on pre-charge detention - which could all send a clear message - but also we would like the British government to play a very active role, as it has indeed done in Burma and other places, but make sure that human rights are in the centre of many of those political processes," Khan said.

Speaking on Sky News, she called on Britain to "clean up its act" and said world leaders "cannot be seen to be leaders unless they do so by example".

The EU should investigate the "complicity of its member states" in renditions of terrorist suspects, she added.

"But there is an opportunity in the coming year for world leaders to set a new direction. There are new leaders coming to power, in the US for instance, there are new countries emerging on the world stage, and the United Kingdom could certainly lead together with them."

The organisation also called on China to adhere to its human rights pledges and on Russia to show greater tolerance for political dissent

Guantanamo Critics Reiterate Protests as Their Trial Opens

Thirty-five people accused of staging an illegal demonstration at the Supreme Court went on trial yesterday and used the proceedings to renew their complaints about conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Many of the 22 men and 13 women wore orange jumpsuits to show solidarity with detainees. They were arrested Jan. 11, accused of illegally protesting on the grounds of the Supreme Court, a misdemeanor that carries up to 60 days in jail.

The demonstration occurred on the sixth anniversary of the opening of the detention facility, which was set up to house terrorism suspects. Yesterday, the defendants continued to make political statements about the treatment of detainees as their trial began in D.C. Superior Court.

As a clerk for Judge Wendell P. Gardner Jr. took attendance, each defendant stood up, gave his or her name and spoke the name of someone they described as a Guantanamo detainee. Some of the prisoners mentioned died at the prison. The gesture was meant to give the detainees a voice in court.

Matthew Daloisio, 31, of New York said he was speaking on behalf of Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in 2006 in what the Defense Department called a coordinated suicide with two other detainees. As Daloisio spoke, several co-defendants said, "God forgive us."

Because the charges are misdemeanors punishable by less than six months in jail, the case is being heard by a judge instead of a jury.

In opening statements, prosecutors said that the case was not about freedom of speech but about disobeying police orders regarding assembly. Assistant U.S. Attorney Magdalena Acevedo said the group left the sidewalk, where demonstrations are legal, and, despite warnings, moved to the plaza of the Supreme Court, where such activities are barred by law.

"If they had stayed in the permissible area, they could have spoken as much as they wanted to," she said.

About 150 people gathered on the sidewalk during the demonstration, but only about 35 or so went to the plaza. They carried signs that said "Shut down Guantanamo" and knelt on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The protesters are a part of a group called Witness Against Torture, which has held demonstrations across the country condemning the prison. They range in age from their 20s to 70s. The group's leaders said the defendants include a hog farmer from Grinnell, Iowa, a social worker from Saratoga Springs, New York, and a legal secretary from Baltimore.

Before the trial, the group's members -- wearing the orange jumpsuits and black hoods -- marched from the Supreme Court to D.C. Superior Court.

In court, the defendants filled the jury box and the left side of the room. Their supporters filled the other side, and some in the crowd had to wait in the hallway.

The demonstrators are representing themselves, with help from lawyer Mark Goldstone, a First Amendment specialist who is acting as an adviser.

They scored a first-day victory when the judge dismissed the case against protester David Barrows of the District. Gardner said that a police officer who testified failed to identify Barrows while reviewing a police videotape of the protest. The dismissal drew cheers from the audience and a call for quiet from the judge.

The trial is expected to last two to three days.

Censors put limits on Guantánamo photos

Guards put on a mock war court conviction to test the $12 million expeditionary legal compound; censors put a three-tent limit on photos; a Sudanese detainee cracked wise.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Pity the photographer who takes a picture of five tents in a row at ``Camp Justice.''

Or two whole tents and slivers of two others.

Under the latest rules for ''operational security,'' there's now a three-tent rule for photos the public can see of the tents that house journalists and support staff at the expeditionary legal compound, where reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are due to get their first taste of military commission justice June 5.

Censorship of news photos has evolved to show, well, less and less across the 6 ½-year Defense Department venture in detaining and at times interrogating war-on-terrorism suspects here.

And numbers do count.

At Camp Delta, the prison camps, photographers are forbidden from showing two guard towers -- or, for that matter, any one detainee's face, except in shadows that make him look like nobody in particular.

Broadly, the military explains the need for operational security, or OP-SEC, two different ways.

First, they seek to shield from public view any details of this remote base that might help al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States stage an attack.

Second, they want to shield from public view the faces of detainees because the Geneva Conventions prohibit the parade or humiliation of prisoners of war.

• Heard at the war court:

An Air Force judge, Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, at one point told defendant Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, that if he wanted to arrange a phone call home to Sudan through the International Committee of the Red Cross, ``This is up to you.''

The slight, dark man with a salt-and-pepper beard looked stunned.

''Me?'' he sputtered.

``What can I do? I'm a detainee. I cannot do anything about anything.''

The one thing he could do Thursday, for hours, was refuse an effort by his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, to help orchestrate the call.

• Mindful that the audio broke, the video froze and the power went off earlier this month, military commissions staff spent much of Tuesday testing the technology at their two courtrooms at Camp Justice.

Guards played judge, lawyers and, sometimes detainees, while a technician posed as a witness and an Arabic language translator hired by the war court at one point sat in an alleged terrorist's seat.

The goal is glitch-free simultaneous hearings at the old retrofitted courtroom as well as the $12 million state-of-the-art expeditionary legal compound, once the war crimes trials get rolling sometime after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in late June.

So Tuesday morning, U.S. forces were reading from a fake script of a trial of a fictional war on terror detainee named Abdul Khadr of Yemen during a daylong equipment check.

Declared one guard playing a presiding officer: ''Mr. Khadr, this commission has convicted you of conspiracy.'' Next Khadr's jury of military officers, called commissioners, were going into secret session to see the evidence against him.

So the presiding officer ordered the feed cut to the media's press room.

But the feed kept going, and reporters at an adjacent media center got to watch the guard playing a detainee get convicted twice before lunch.

No one could explain who exactly wrote the fake script and why.

But by afternoon the war court script was gone and guards were back in their places, reciting lines from the 1988 Hollywood hit Big -- the Tom Hanks tale of a boy who makes a wish and suddenly finds himself living the life of a man.