Families sue over Guantánamo Bay suicides

The US department of defence is being sued over the suicide deaths of two Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, said it was seeking unspecified damages on behalf of the families of Salah al-Salami and Yasser al-Zahrani, both Saudis.

The claim was announced yesterday, on the second anniversary of their deaths with another detainee from Yemen. All three hanged themselves inside their cells with bed sheets.

"After two years, there has still been no public accounting for what happened to these men," Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer at the centre, said in a statement.

The centre said it could not find the family of the Yemeni man.

The US military said the suicides prompted a complete review of operations at the detention centre in Cuba.

"As we value life, the deaths two years ago were deeply saddening," Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman and navy commander, said yesterday.

The military would release the results of its investigation of the deaths when the findings were ready, he said.

Washington is forging ahead with the prosecution of about 80 of the roughly 270 men being held at Guantánamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to the Taliban or al-Qaida.

They include the UK resident Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, who is accused of an al-Qaida dirty bomb plot to attack apartment buildings in the US.

His lawyers have condemned the charges against him as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

About this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday June 11 2008. It was last updated at 12:03 on June 11 2008.

British resident at Guantánamo faces bombing charge

A UK resident imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay is to be charged by the Pentagon over an alleged al-Qaida dirty bomb plot.

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian educated in the UK, is accused of planning to blow up apartment buildings in the US.

The Pentagon's chargesheet for the 30-year-old, who had training as an electrical engineer, states he was selected for "a specialised terrorist mission".

Mohamed allegedly plotted with other operatives in building remote-controlled explosive devices in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The alleged aim was to unleash a radioactive dirty bomb against an unspecified US location.

Yesterday, his lawyers condemned the charges as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

Mohamed faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

The director of British legal rights group Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith, said: "The least the British government can do is insist that no British resident be charged in a kangaroo court on evidence tortured out of him with a razor blade."

Mohamed, one of two British residents still held at Guantánamo was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002 and taken to Morocco by the CIA.

Once there, it is alleged he was beaten and handcuffed during prolonged interrogations as well as being tortured with a scalpel. His mental state has deteriorated as a result, his lawyers say.

Mohamed is said by the Pentagon to have conspired with Jose Padilla, the US citizen and former Chicago gang member who was convicted by a federal court in Florida last year of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Padilla, 37, was sentenced to 17 years in prison in January.

Mohamed's chargesheet also states that he and Padilla were instructed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a confessed mastermind of 9/11, to rent apartments in large US cities, fill the corridors and air ducts with natural gas and then blow them up.

In August last year, Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband formally asked the Bush administration to release Mohamed, along with four other UK residents at Guantanamo.

Three of the men were sent home but the US refused to release Mohamed and Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, citing security concerns.

The Guantánamo Bay detention centre, situated on a US base in southern Cuba, currently holds around 270 men.

Prosecutors have indicated they intend to try around 80 of the prisoners in the first US war crimes tribunal since the second world war.

Attorney general tells law grads that attorneys shouldn't be punished for protecting country

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is defending former government lawyers who drew up the legal basis of the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation methods against terror suspects.

Mukasey told Boston College Law School graduates Friday that lawyers doing their part to protect the country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks should not now be held liable or face criminal charges for doing so.

Mukasey did not mention any specific lawyers by name.

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is facing at least one civil lawsuit and demands for his firing from Berkeley Law School. Yoo worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.

While there, he wrote several memos legally defending the use of harsh interrogation tactics which are now under criticism by human rights groups and members of Congress. Yoo's memos concluded that President Bush has broad, unfettered wartime authority that cannot be limited by domestic law or international bans on torture.

One memo defined torture, as recognized by U.S. law, as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by organ failure or accompanying death.

An internal Justice Department investigation is now considering whether such advice was improper.

At the Friday ceremony, Mukasey lambasted critics seeking to bring lawsuits or charges against the lawyers. "The rhetoric of these discussions is hostile and unforgiving," Mukasey said in his prepared remarks.

Mukasey's confirmation as attorney general briefly stalled over the issue of waterboarding, an interrogation method simulating drowning that critics call torture. He has since refused to say whether waterboarding is illegal since it is no longer used by the CIA or military interrogators.

5 Gitmo detainees to face 9/11 capital case

A Pentagon official has formally approved death penalty charges against reputed 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men for allegedly conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, according to their charge sheet obtained Monday night by The Miami Herald.

Military Commissions officials e-mailed the approved charge sheets to defense lawyers in Washington, D.C., after the close of business Monday -- confirming plans for the first war court prosecution seeking execution as the ultimate penalty.

That means that, absent defense requests for delay, the men could make their first appearance at the Guantánamo war court in June.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, declined to release the charges publicly, or discuss them. ''When we have something to announce, we will,'' he said in an e-mail Monday evening.

But according to the document obtained by The Herald, a Bush appointee named Susan Crawford approved the charges on Friday, authorizing a common, complex capital trial for the five men. She deleted from the charge sheet the prosecution of a Saudi captive at Guantánamo, Mohammed al Qahtani, who had been initially included in the group.

Now, the five are accused of conspiring to kill 2,973 people by financing, directing and organizing the 9/11 suicide missions. In all, 19 suicide bombers hijacked four airliners nearly seven years ago and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Crawford's signature, and the delivery of translated versions of the 93-page charge sheet to the accused, triggers a statutory speedy trial clock that requires the men be brought before a military judge within 30 days.

''It's still a death case -- that is correct,'' said Navy Reserves Capt. Prescott Prince, the appointed defense counsel for Mohammed, or KSM.

He scorned the stealthy, after-hours delivery as ``arrogant.''

The five men had been interrogated and held for years in secret CIA custody. Then, in September 2006, President Bush ordered their transfer to the U.S. Navy base for trial. None of them had seen a lawyer until this year. They are now held in top-secret isolation at Guantánamo in a special prison camp for former CIA-held detainees.

They are Mohammed, who allegedly organized the 9/11 attacks for Osama bin Laden; Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al Baluchi; Ramzi bin al Shibh, a Yemeni who allegedly organized the Sept. 11 suicide squads; and alleged co-conspirators Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi.

No full-blown trial is expected before the end of the Bush administration. Legal experts predict lengthy pre-trial challenges in part because the government may rely onclassified evidence. The CIA has confirmed that during secret interrogation Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding -- a simulated drowning technique widely known as "water torture.

Moreover, Baluchi's attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, said Monday night he was filing a motion to dismiss the charges on grounds of "unlawful command influence.''

Last week, a Navy judge disqualified the legal adviser for military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, from oversight of the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver in a similar motion that argued the general has not been neutral in the process. Mizer is attorney for both the driver, Salim Hamdan of Yemen, in a non-death-penalty case and Baluchi, a Pakistani.

''Gen. Hartmann was the driving force behind these [9/11] charges and he provided the legal advice to the convening authority,'' said Mizer. "These charges are dead on arrival.''

Qahtani, the Saudi detainee whom Crawford struck from an earlier, proposed charge sheet, had at one point been thought by U.S. intelligence to be the so-called 20th Hijacker -- the man who didn't get to the United States in time to join the other 19 terrorists in the suicide attacks.

U.S. immigration officers at Orlando airport had refused Qahtani entry into the country in the summer of 2001. After his capture in the war-on-terror and transfer to Cuba, then--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a special military interrogation regime for Qahtani.

According to a leaked copy of his November-December 2002 interrogation log, U.S. interrogators used sleep deprivation, left him naked or strapped to an intravenous drip without bathroom breaks to get him to confess. They also told him to bark like a dog.

Later, he got a lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez of the New York Center for Constitutional Rights, who said he recanted his confession.

Monday night, Gutierrez said the Crawford's decision to strike her client's name from the charge sheet was a vindication.

''The dismissal of Qahtani's charges affirm that everything he said at Guantánamo was extracted through torture -- or the threat of torture,'' she said.

His treatment at the Pentagon's war on terror detention center was "so well documented and unconscionable,'' she said, "that he is unprosecutable and should be return to the custody of Saudi Arabia.''

I will add to this post later

While Bush continues to insist that torture does not occur at Guantánamo, abusive tactics are still permitted and the CIA retains the freedom to waterboard prisoners. Bush vetoed a total ban on waterboarding and was supported by Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

Torture victim's records lost at Guantánamo, admits camp general

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days - "were backed up ... after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost", Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

The CIA admitted last year that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a secret "black site" in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands' report suggests the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators at the prison camp.

Other new evidence has also emerged in the last month that raises questions about destroyed tapes at Guantánamo.

Cameras that run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents, the US military admitted in court papers. It is unclear how much, if any, prisoner mistreatment was on the taped-over video, but the military admitted that the automatic erasure "likely destroyed" potential evidence in at least one prisoner's case.

The erased tapes may have violated a 2005 court order to preserve "all evidence [of] the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees" at Guantánamo. The order was retroactive, so it also applies to the 2003 loss of al-Qahtani's records.

Lawyers representing other Guantánamo detainees are asking whether tapes of their clients' treatment may also be erased. "You can't just destroy relevant evidence," said Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York.

David H Remes, a lawyer for 16 Guantánamo prisoners, said the CIA's destruction of interrogation videos shows the US government is capable of getting rid of potentially incriminating evidence.

"[In Guantánamo] the government had a system that automatically overwrote records," Remes told the Guardian. "That is a passive form of evidence destruction. If a party has destroyed evidence in one place, there's no reason to assume it has preserved evidence in another place."

More than 24,000 interrogations were videotaped at Guantánamo, according to a US army report unearthed by researchers at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

The US military office at Guantánamo did not return a request for comment from the Guardian about its taping policies.

Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture

Senior officials bypassed army chief to introduce interrogation methods

America's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington, who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date, is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts of which appear in today's Guardian.

In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, reveals that:

· Senior Bush administration figures pushed through previously outlawed measures with the aid of inexperienced military officials at Guantánamo.

· Myers believes he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of vice-president Dick Cheney, and at Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.

· The Guantánamo lawyers charged with devising interrogation techniques were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24.

· Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army's field manual.

The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.

The revelations have sparked a fierce response in the US from those familiar with the contents of the book, and who are determined to establish accountability for the way the Bush administration violated international and domestic law by sanctioning prisoner abuse and torture.

The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands' book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.

Myers was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done. Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, says he was "confused" about the decisions that were taken.

Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantánamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.

"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled," writes Sands. "Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him."

Myers and his closest advisers were cut out of the decision-making process. He did not know that Bush administration officials were changing the rules allowing interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, amounting to torture.

"We never authorised torture, we just didn't, not what we would do," Myers said. Sands comments: "He really had taken his eye off the ball ... he didn't ask too many questions ... and kept his distance from the decision-making process."

Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time, told the Guardian: "I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralised the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways.

"The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans.

"At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job".

He added: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

Internal Justice Dept. Investigation Includes Yoo Torture Memo

Just how bad were John Yoo's now-infamous torture memos?

After numerous calls from Congress for the DoJ to get digging, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility told Congress in February that it is busy investigating Yoo's infamous August, 2002 torture memo. That one, signed by then Office of Legal Counsel chief Jay Bybee, limited the definition of torture to physical pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." It was the administration's so-called "golden shield" which permitted the CIA to use its most aggressive interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.

And then in March of 2003 came Yoo's memo broadly authorizing the use of torture by military interrogators on unlawful combatants. Now OPR has told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that it will be investigating that memo, too.

It is far short of a criminal investigation. OPR's job is to police whether the Department's lawyers behave professionally, and so in this case, OPR's chief Marshall Jarrett has informed Congress that the investigation will be covering "whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys."

So the question for OPR will be whether Yoo came to his roundly-denounced conclusions in a professional, ethical manner. OPR's investigations are usually not publicly released, but Jarrett wrote that "OPR will consider releasing to Congress and the public a non-classified summary of our final report." There's no telling when that would be.

There are plenty of grumbles that the limited scope and independence of OPR's investigation (OPR reports to the attorney general) mean that it won't tell us enough and won't result in any changes. And Attorney General Michael Mukasey has already made it clear that no matter how deeply flawed an Office of Legal Counsel memo might have been (or be), anyone who relied on it "could not be the subject of a prosecution."

U.S. to televise Guantanamo trials to 9-11 families

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The U.S. military will televise the Guantanamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the U.S. mainland.

"We're going to broadcast in real time to several locations that will be available just to victim families," Army Col. Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the controversial war crimes court, said at the naval base recently.

In February, military prosecutors charged Mohammed and five other captives with murder and conspiracy and asked that they be executed if convicted of plotting to crash hijacked planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

No trial date has been set but they are the first Guantanamo prisoners charged with direct involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Morris said several of the victims' relatives asked to watch the trials at the detention center set up in Guantanamo Bay naval base to try foreign terrorism suspects.

The base sits on a dusty patch of the island of Cuba and does not have many flights, beds or courtroom seats to accommodate spectators.

The trials will be beamed to closed-circuit television viewing sites on military bases at Fort Hamilton in New York, Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Fort Meade in Maryland and Fort Devens in Massachusetts, Morris said.

The military is borrowing a page from the civilian court sentencing hearing of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school student who is the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the September 11 plot. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with al Qaeda and was sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. federal courts normally ban cameras. But through an act of Congress, Moussaoui's 2006 court hearing in Virginia was shown by closed-circuit television to victims' families at courthouses in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"We got much more information from those hearings than we ever got from the 9-11 Commission," said Lorie Van Auken, whose husband Kenneth died in the World Trade Center, referring to the investigation the U.S. Congress launched into the attacks.

FAIR TRIALS OR SHOW TRIALS?

Some of the victims' relatives praised the U.S. military for ensuring they had access to the Guantanamo proceedings.

Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother, Donald and Jean Peterson, died on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, called the prosecutors "true patriots," and said he was grateful for "the ability to see justice being fulfilled in one of the most significant attacks on America's heartland."

Others urged the trials be televised nationwide without restriction because of the sweeping impact of the attacks.

The broadcasts will mark the first time a Guantanamo detainee's face has been shown publicly. The U.S. military prohibits journalists and other visitors from taking photographs or video that shows faces, citing a provision of the Geneva Conventions that aims to protect war captives from "insults and public curiosity."

The U.S. military lawyer assigned to defend Mohammed, Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, said if the trials are truly fair, then broadcasting them widely would prove that to the world. But he worried about setting a precedent by televising what he suspects will be show trials.

"I can just imagine American soldiers and sailors and airmen being subjected to similar show trials worldwide," he said.

He said he doubts the defendants can get a fair trial in the Guantanamo court because it accepts hearsay evidence that may have been obtained through cruel and dehumanizing means. The Geneva provision cited in shielding prisoners' faces also bans "acts of violence or intimidation," he noted.

The CIA held Mohammed in a secret prison for years and acknowledged interrogating him with methods that included the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Some of the victims' relatives also said they thought the trials should be held in a regular court, open to the public and using only "evidence that's above reproach."

"This is not about revenge, it's about justice," said Valerie Lucznikowska, a New Yorker whose nephew Adam Arias died in the World Trade Center.

"I don't want it to be a lynching. I'm concerned that people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we won't be able to find them guilty because of what we've done with them. It's a horrible conundrum."

Pentagon Records Detail Prisoner Abuse

WASHINGTON - Military interrogators assaulted Afghan detainees in 2003, using investigation methods they learned during self-defense training, Pentagon documents released April 16 show.

Detainees at the Gardez Detention Facility in southeastern Afghanistan reported being made to kneel outside in wet clothing and being kicked and punched in the kidneys, nose and knees if they moved, according to the documents.

A 2006 Army review concluded that the detainees were not abused but that the incident revealed "misconduct that warrants further action."

The documents, which were turned over April 16 to the American Civil Liberties Union, focus on the 2003 death of Afghan detainee Jamal Nasser, who died in U.S. custody at the Gardez facility.

The documents detail interrogation techniques used on eight detainees, including Nasser, who were suspected of weapons trafficking.

The Army review found that abuse did not cause Nasser's death. But the documents include interviews with some interrogators who acknowledged slapping the detainees - a technique they learned during survival training at the Army's SERE school. SERE stands for Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape.

"You say you gave permission for (redacted) to hit detainees during interrogations; did you have a memorandum or order from your higher headquarters authorizing that?" a military criminal investigator asked one of the interrogators, according to a November 2004 transcript among the more than 300 pages of documents.

"No, I did not have a memorandum and had not seen one," the interrogator answered, according to the transcript. "I used tactics that were used in SERE."

The investigator continued: "Did you see (redacted) hit detainees during the interviews?"

"Yes, open or closed slaps, not punches," the interrogator answered.

In another interview that day, according to the documents, the Army investigator asks whether "you ever heard of a tactic of pouring cold water or a water and snow mix on persons captured?"

"They do spray cold water on prisoners," the interrogator answered, referring to SERE lessons. That interrogator was unaware, however, of men in his unit pouring cold water over the detainees, as the Afghans later complained.

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said such interrogation techniques are taught at SERE schools only to show Soldiers how to withstand them from enemy captors. She called the methods, when used together, a form of torture.

"They were intended to be defensive methods, not offensive methods," Singh said. "This raises serious questions about the interrogation methods that were being applied in Afghanistan."

SERE methods were also used on detainees by military interrogators in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Singh said.

The Pentagon and the Army did not immediately respond to requests for comment April 16.

The 2004 criminal inquiry of Nasser's death was among a string of probes into alleged abuse of prisoners in U.S. jails in Afghanistan.

Trying to deflect the kind of scandal that followed the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan ordered a review of their secretive network of about 20 jails at bases across Afghanistan.

Nasser was among eight detainees who were held at Gardez for between 18 and 20 days. The Army concluded he died of a stomach ailment.

Idaho attorneys to assist alleged al Qaeda kingpin

WASHINGTON -- The Navy officer assigned to defend reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed said Monday he is assembling a four-attorney team to stave off the alleged 9/11 mastermind's death-penalty charges -- two military JAG officers and two lawyers from Boise, Idaho, who have defended an alleged terrorist before.

Navy Capt. Prescott ''Scott'' Prince was detailed to the case last week. He has yet to see Mohammed, a U.S.-educated Pakistani citizen known in intelligence circles as ``KSM.''

On Feb. 11, the Pentagon prosecutor identified Mohammed as the lead defendant in a proposed prosecution to try six detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on capital murder conspiracy charges in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Prince said Boise law partners David Z. Nevin and Scott McKay have agreed to work as volunteer civilian defense counsel under a program sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In 2004, McKay and Nevin secured a federal court acquittal for a Saudi man, Sami al-Hussayen, 34, who was a doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho.

In U.S. anti-terror sweeps following the 9/11 attacks, Hussayen was accused of ''providing material support for terror,'' for allegedly serving as webmaster for a Muslim charity that the U.S. government called an al Qaeda front. He was cleared of all charges and returned to his native Saudi Arabia.

No stranger to unpopular cases, Nevin also won an acquittal for Kevin Harris, a friend of Randy Weaver's, accused of killing a U.S. marshall in the 1993 Ruby Ridge case.

In addition, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for military commissions, Army Reserves Col. Steve David, was in the process of assigning another U.S. military lawyer or JAG, short for judge advocate general, to the KSM case.

Prince said in an interview that he would also add a paralegal, a translator and intelligence analyst to his team. Additionally, he was seeking Pentagon approval for a so-called ''mitigation expert'' on the case.

Prince said he anticipated ''a very complex documentary case,'' with lots of evidence to sift through in light of U.S. government disclosures that Mohammed had been held four years incommunicado, never seen a lawyer and was subjected to White House approved ``enhanced interrogation techniques.''

The CIA has confirmed that Mohammed was among three war-on-terror captives who was waterboarded in U.S. custody, a simulated drowning technique that Prince flatly labeled ``torture.''

Ultimately, under military commissions rules, it will be up to Mohammed to decide whether he will accept any of the attorneys.

In recent, non-capital cases brought before to the military commissions, three alleged al Qaeda foot soldiers have fired their Pentagon-paid defense lawyers, and said they would boycott their trials.

In those cases, conviction carries life in prison. Acquittal likewise means likely continued detention as the U.S. government argues that ''enemy combatants'' can be held at Guantánamo until the end of hostilities in the global war on terror.

In capital cases, conviction could carry execution although no system for carrying out the death penalty has been established at Guantánamo.

Prince said he hoped to introduce himself to Mohammed in coming weeks, after getting special security clearances governing former CIA held detainees at the remote U.S. Navy base.

Nevin and McKay need the same clearances and would meet him later, if Mohammed agrees to their volunteering to work on the case. It is believed that neither have ever visited the offshore detention center.

Both men declined through an assistant to comment on Monday.

An ACLU news release had earlier listed Nevin and McKay among leading national criminal defense lawyers whom the civil liberties group had enlisted for a nascent Guantánamo death-penalty defense program, to be called The John Adams project.

'Extraordinary-rendition' procedure unreliable, says CIA vet who created it

DURHAM, N.C. — The creator of the CIA's "extraordinary-rendition" program says he has always distrusted interrogation intelligence flowing from the controversial practice, given that the admissions it produced were usually "very tainted" by foreign agencies who jailed suspects at the behest of the United States.

Michael Scheuer, an outspoken anti-terrorism crusader, took part in a Duke University law-school panel on Friday. There, experts debated the future of the highly controversial snatch, jail and interrogate program that he created, and whether it should survive beyond the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which has often justified rendition as an intelligence gold mine.

In Canada, rendition has become synonymous with the process that resulted in Ottawa's Maher Arar spending a year in a Syrian jail, where he was beaten with electric cables during the first phases of his captivity. Canadian officials have apologized to the telecommunications engineer and compensated him with $10-million (U.S.), upholding that he was wrongly smeared in intelligence exchanges emanating from Canada, prior to the U.S. decision to render him.

The Bush administration has proven far less contrite in the Arar affair and similar cases, blocking lawsuits on the grounds that probing rendition would illegally spill state secrets.

An estimated 100 to 150 people have been rendered to foreign prisons by the U.S. program, of which Mr. Scheuer remains a big booster. Now retired, he created the program when he was a Central Intelligence Agency analyst tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden. He said the program has been enormously valuable, at least in terms of taking high-level terrorists off the streets and seeing what documents they carried.

But he added that resulting interrogations proved dubious once suspects were sent to third-country prisons, such as Syria or Egypt. "You could bet on the testimony given to you, it was altered in a way that would serve the interests of the country that was giving it," he said. "So, it was very tainted, in the sense that if Country X or Country Y interrogated these people, you would really have some information, but it would be far from coupled with what was actually being said."

Mr. Scheuer didn't dispute that torture has occurred in foreign jails where the United States sent suspects - "You'd have to assume that 80 per cent [of prisoners rendered to Egypt] are not going to have a good time," he said - but said simply that he didn't particularly care. "I'm perfectly happy to do anything to defend the United States, so long as the lawyers sign off on it," he said.

After 9/11, the Bush administration decided to enhance Mr. Scheuer's pre-existing rendition program with international "black-site" prisons where U.S. officials would lead interrogations in secret CIA jails. "I am much less experienced in the Bush administration," Mr. Scheuer conceded. "I ran rendition operations from July '95 until June of '99."

Speaking at Duke, Mr. Scheuer did put some distance between the program he hatched in 1995 and events that occurred after 2001. "The bar was lowered after 9/11," he said.

In addition to Mr. Arar's case in Canada, high-profile renditions controversies have arisen in Germany and Italy. Mr. Scheuer made a point of saying he would personally put the German suspect back on a rendition plane, but did not say the same that about the other two cases. The program he conceived was restricted to targeting only the highest level terrorism suspects, he said.

Questioned about the Arar affair, Mr. Scheuer asserted that that rendition was not technically a CIA job, but rather an FBI initiative, by agents working in cahoots with unspecified agencies north of the border.

That prompted a response from Canadian lawyer Ron Atkey, who was in attendance to give a speech about the years he spent inside the Arar Commission battling government secrecy to reveal what Canada knew about the CIA rendition program.

Mr. Atkey pointed out Canadian agencies were found to have had no foreknowledge of the U.S. decision to put Mr. Arar on a Gulfstream jet and fly him to the Middle East, after his 2002 arrest in a New York airport.

"The biggest piece of baloney," Mr. Scheuer said. "They [the Canadians] were totally surprised like Captain Renault in Casablanca," he quipped.

The allusion referred to a scene in the 1942 film, where a duplicitous French gendarme shuts down an illegal casino operation in Morocco - saying "I'm shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here!" even as he is handed a big win from the roulette wheel.

Mr. Scheuer went on to describe certain U.S. newspaper reporters as "scurrilous" traitors for revealing details of the rendition program.

After the panel, however, he said he wasn't necessarily familiar with the domestic investigations that led to the Arar affair.

New roadblocks delay tribunals at Guantánamo

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba: When military officials announced war crimes charges against six detainees for the Sept. 11 attacks two months ago, the move was part of an effort to accelerate the Bush administration's sluggish military commission system, which has yet to hold a single trial.

But the Sept. 11 case immediately hit a snag. Military defense lawyers were in short supply, and even now, two months later, not one of the six detainees has met his military lawyer.
The delay in getting lawyers to those detainees, which largely grew out of a struggle within the Pentagon over legal resources, is indicative of the confounding obstacles facing this latest effort to expedite the military tribunals.

Since fall, when charges had been lodged against just three detainees, military officials have charged 12 more terrorism suspects. Yet there is a growing consensus among lawyers inside and outside the military that few of those cases are likely to actually come to trial before the end of the Bush administration.

"Speed is going to be very, very difficult to accomplish here," said Stephen Saltzburg, a military law expert at George Washington University. "They may be overconfident that if they just push ahead, all the ducks will end up in a row. I don't think that's going to happen."

The road to a trial is difficult in some cases partly because they involve potential death penalties and claims of torture by interrogators, issues that raise thorny legal questions that could take months or longer to sort out. But even comparatively simple cases without capital penalty issues are proceeding slowly.

In addition, just as the Pentagon is pushing to try cases in part to show the viability of the tribunal system, some civil liberties groups and defense lawyers are working to slow the pace, partly to keep the system from gaining legitimacy by eliciting testimony against terrorism suspects that could inflame Americans. They say they plan a dizzying array of challenges to try to prevent any significant number of what they call political trials.

They are particularly focused on the Sept. 11 case, which for more than six years has been expected to be the centerpiece of the Bush administration's military commission system.
"The government can be assured that this will not be a quick show trial," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Not if we can help it."

The ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers announced a plan last week to provide experienced defense lawyers for some detainees.

The standoff over the military lawyers for the Sept. 11 suspects grew out of a long-running dispute over legal resources at the Pentagon. The chief military defense lawyer for Guantánamo, Colonel Steven David, said in an interview that he lacked enough experienced lawyers and other staff members.

Guantánamo military defense lawyers have long said they are not given resources by the Pentagon to match the investigative capability of the military prosecution, which draws on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies. Until a handful of new military lawyers were appointed this week to represent Sept. 11 defendants, the military defense office was sharply outnumbered, with 15 defense lawyers to battle 31 prosecutors.

But Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, an official of the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, argued that the defense office was staffed well enough to have begun to defend the Sept. 11 case the day it was announced.

In a recent interview, Hartmann, who has been pressing to move more quickly on the Guantánamo cases, made clear that he was impatient. "You have to get the train moving so you can get to a destination," he said. "And the train hadn't been moving."

But even with enough lawyers, David said, there were countless impediments to quick trials, including questions about how the tribunals are to deal with detainees' claims of torture. Lacking precedents and clear rules, he said, "there are issues within issues within issues."

At a news conference here on Wednesday, the deputy chief military prosecutor, Colonel Bruce Pagel, said that while the government wanted quick trials, the pace would largely be determined by military judges.

"There is just no predicting that," Pagel said. "There are just too many variables."
Each of the 14 cases now pending presents legal tangles. In one, the morass grew so thick that the judge scheduled pretrial proceedings after the date he had set for the trial, evidently realizing that there were too many unresolved issues to rush the case. In another, a detainee refused to leave his cell for an arraignment and had to be forcibly extracted.

On Wednesday, proceedings were delayed when a detainee complained that the tribunal translation was flawed. After that was resolved, the detainee, Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al Darbi, declared the proceeding political and refused to participate, adding, "History will record these trials as a scandal against you."

Prosecutors planned this week to arraign two suspects, one who they say was a Qaeda paymaster and the other, they say, a propaganda chief. But that rudimentary step is not to go off as they had hoped. The case of the propaganda chief had to be postponed because his military lawyer had recently left the defense office, taking that case back to its starting point.

By chance, the alleged paymaster and the alleged propaganda chief were the first ones identified for war crimes trials by the Pentagon back in 2004. Yet all Guantánamo cases were derailed in 2006 when the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration's first war crimes system.

The first trial of a detainee under the new system is now scheduled for May 28. But defense lawyers for that defendant, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden, have filed nearly 30 legal motions, raising questions that included procedural issues and basic challenges to the Guantánamo system itself.

Andrea Prasow, one of Hamdan's lawyers, said her experience in a comparatively simple Guantánamo case showed the extraordinary complexities that seem certain to entangle all of the battles here.

It may be possible, Prasow said, for one or two cases to be tried by the fall. But, she said, "I don't see how it is remotely possible for the others to get under way."

Some of the defense requests in Hamdan's case show the kinds of issues that are tying prosecutors in knots. His lawyers have accused Pentagon officials of improperly influencing the prosecution by directing that charges be filed for political reasons and, the lawyers said, demanding "sexy" cases to attract public attention. They also claim that Hamdan is so psychologically damaged by the conditions under which he has been held that he is incapable of assisting his lawyers.

The Hamdan defense has worried prosecutors by winning the right to submit written questions to four detainees who were formerly held in secret CIA prisons.

The request to question prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, brought strong objections from prosecutors who said it could be a national security threat.

When a military judge allowed very limited written questions, the prosecutors pleaded with him to reconsider. The judge stuck with his ruling.

But a major battle is expected if, as seems likely, Hamdan's defense follows that request with a demand that those former CIA detainees be called to testify in public.

J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the charges, which seek the death penalty against the six men charged with the 2001 attack, are so complex that defense teams in those cases will need months, if not years, to prepare. The center represented one of the six men in a case challenging his detention before the war crimes charges were filed.

"There is no possibility," Dixon said, "that these cases are going to proceed to trial any time soon."

Hartmann said trials in any system could be subject to delays. But he said he had told military prosecutors and court officials not to get distracted as problems cropped up.

"My guidance to people," he said, "is 'keep moving' and when the rocks start to fall on you, you move a little faster."

ABC Report: Bush’s ‘Principal’ Advisers OK’d Torture

ABC News reported tonight that President Bush’s most senior and trusted advisers met in “dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House” beginning in 2002 to approve the use of “combined” interrogation techniques (the joint use of harsh interrogation techniques).

Those tactics included whether detainees “would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.”

Members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee — Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft — approved the use of these techniques. “Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.”

According to ABC’s report, Ashcroft indicated he was troubled by the meetings:
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.

ACLU taps top legal talent to defend accused 9-11 plotters

The American Civil Liberties Union, which for years has scorned Pentagon military commissions as "kangaroo courts,'' announced Friday that it will try to provide top civilian defense attorneys for alleged terrorists facing trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Former Attorney General Janet Reno is among top lawyers who've endorsed the $8.5 million effort, which will help coordinate and defray the expenses of civilian defense attorneys working on the terrorism cases. Under the military commissions scheme, the Pentagon won't reimburse volunteer civilian attorneys for their expenses.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said a major thrust of the effort will be to defend Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who military officials say has confessed to masterminding the 9-11 attacks and several other terrorist acts, including the beheading in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.

The ACLU chose to focus on Mohammed's defense, Romero said, because he appears to be "the government's top priority in the prosecution. And whether or not they are able to convict Khalid Sheik Mohammed under these rules may well determine the fate of the almost 300 other men who are detained at Guantanamo.''

Mohammed was held in secret CIA custody until September 2006, and the CIA has admitted subjecting him to waterboarding while he was being questioned. Waterboarding is simulated drowning and is considered torture by many rights advocates.

Mohammed's case "is likely to raise the most significant issues of torture, hearsay evidence and access to counsel,'' Romero said.

At the Pentagon, a war court spokesman said the Office of Military Commissions hadn't received details about the ACLU program.

But Air Force Capt. Andre Kok noted that the law governing the trials entitles each Guantanamo defendant to a military defense lawyer and that volunteer civilian attorneys can also participate, without government reimbursement.

"The system allows for that,'' said Kok. "There's a mechanism set in place for them to become part of that pool of qualified attorneys.''

Romero said 11 lawyers have agreed to defend Guantanamo detainees facing death penalty charges under the program, which the ACLU has dubbed "The John Adams Project'' after the second president of the United States, who as an attorney was subjected to ridicule for defending British soldiers accused of killing colonists in the 1770 Boston Massacre.

Because the prisoners have been cast by the White House as the most reviled enemies of America, the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers issued endorsements of the effort from high-profile lawyers, including one from Reno, who served as President Clinton's attorney general for both of his terms and is the longest-serving attorney general in U.S. history.

"This is the time to demonstrate to the world that the United States need not abandon its principles,'' said Reno, "even as it seeks to ensure the safety of its citizens.''

The program described Friday is the result of a stealthy collaboration between the ACLU, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and uniformed U.S. military lawyers.

On Feb. 11, the Pentagon prosecutor filed proposed death-penalty charges against Mohammed and five other men as alleged co-conspirators in the 9-11 attacks.

Since then Army Reserves Col. Steve David, who is the commissions' chief defense counsel, has been trying to build teams of military attorneys qualified to handle the complicated death penalty cases from the mostly inexperienced military judge advocates general assigned to his office.

David, an Indiana judge in civilian life, has said that he wants to meet American Bar Association standards in the cases — meaning assigning 12 government lawyers, six investigators and six paralegals. At the same time, the defense JAGs have been attending ABA death-penalty training classes.

The military commissions' legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, has said that the military commissions are not obliged to follow ABA standards.

Among those who've volunteered to defend the 9-11 conspirators are Idaho attorney David Nevin, whose previous cases include the successful defense of a Saudi charged with terrorism; New York attorney Joshua Dratel, who defended clients charged with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center prosecutions; and Denise LeBoeuf, a prominent New Orleans death penalty defense attorney.

Romero said a noted death-penalty lawyer has agreed to defend Mohammed before the military commission — if he's allowed to see Mohammed in private at the remote Guantanamo U.S. naval base and Mohammed agrees to accept his services.

Romero declined to name the attorney, but said that the lawyer had already applied for the high-level security clearance required to meet with Mohammed, who is held in seclusion at the base.

"The only way you can protect the system from being a complete sham is to make sure that they have a good defense,'' said Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch, who also has been a commission observer. "And one way to do that is to have strong, zealous experienced lawyers.''

Romero said the ACLU decided to champion the defense effort in response to the recent acceleration of military commission prosecution efforts, which some have said are timed for the 2008 campaign season

Pentagon Releases DOJ Torture Memo

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.

The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas - so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo also offered a defense in case any interrogator was charged with violating U.S. or international laws.

"Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability," the memo concluded.

The memo was rescinded in December 2003, a mere nine months after Yoo sent it to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes. Though its existence has been known for years, its release Tuesday marked the first time its contents in full have been made public.

Haynes, the Defense Department's longest-serving general counsel, resigned in late February to return to the private sector. He has been hotly criticized for his role in crafting Bush administration policies for detaining and trying suspected terrorists that some argue led to prisoner abuses at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yoo's memo became part of a debate among the Pentagon's civilian and military leaders about what interrogation tactics to allow at overseas facilities and whether U.S. troops might face legal problems domestically or in international courts.

Also of concern was whether techniques used by U.S. interrogators might someday be used as justification for harsh treatment of Americans captured by opposing forces.

The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, when interrogating terror suspects. It was unclear whether the Yoo memo, which focuses only on military interrogators, will be part of that inquiry.

The declassified memo was released as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to force the Bush administration to turn over documents about the government's war on terror. The document also was turned over to lawmakers.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said its release "represents an accommodation of Congress' oversight interest in the area of wartime interrogations."

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize."

"The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."

The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.

The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.

"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."

The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago.

"It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, D-Vt. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."

Gitmo Prisoner Charged in ’98 Embassy Attack

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A Guantanamo detainee who allegedly helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania that killed 11 people was charged Monday with war crimes that carry a possible death penalty.

Ahmed Kalfan Ghailani - who was held in secret CIA custody before being transferred in 2006 to the U.S. military prison in Cuba - also allegedly purchased and transported the explosives used in the attack and scouted the embassy with a suicide bomber.

Al-Qaida's twin suicide truck-bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998, killed some 236 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000. No Americans died in the attack in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann told a Washington news conference that Ghailani, a Tanzanian, faces charges that include murder, attacking civilians and terrorism. The attack on the embassy in Tanzania was not as devastating as the one in Kenya because an embassy water tanker apparently prevented the suicide bomber from penetrating the perimeter.

Ghailani, who was captured after a gunbattle in Gujrat in eastern Pakistan in July 2004, told a military panel at Guantanamo in March 2007 that he unwittingly delivered the explosives for the attack, didn't know about it beforehand and was sorry.

"It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them," he told the panel, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones."

A senior Pentagon legal official, Susan Crawford, must review and approve the filed charges before any legal proceedings can begin against Ghailani.

The U.S. has so far filed charges against 15 prisoners at Guantanamo and convicted one, Australian David Hicks, in a March 2007 plea bargain. Several detainees have appeared before the tribunal for arraignments or pretrial hearings. The first actual trials are expected to begin in late spring or early summer.

The U.S. now holds about 275 men at Guantanamo and military officials say they expect to file war crimes charges against about 80.

Lawyer: Gitmo trials pegged to '08 campaign

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 late Friday to address the defense lawyer's allegations, noting that the matter is under litigation.

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 in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran 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.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to address the specifics, saying ``the trial process will surface the facts in this case.''

''It has always been everybody's desire to move as swiftly and deliberately as possible to conduct military commissions,'' he added. ``But I can tell you emphatically that leadership has always been extraordinarily careful to guard against any unlawful command influence.''

The brief quotes England as a stipulation of fact and cites other examples of alleged political interference, which Mizer argues makes it impossible for Salim Hamdan, 37, to have a fair trial.

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 has set hearings at Guantánamo for April 30.

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 driving bin Laden in Afghanistan before and during the 9/11 attacks and allegedly working as his sometimes bodyguard. Even if he didn't help plot the suicide attacks, they argue, he is an al Qaeda co-conspirator.

As described the Hamdan brief, the England meeting came 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.

Bush also disclosed that the CIA used ''an alternative set of procedures'' to interrogate the men into confessing -- since revealed by the CIA director, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, to include waterboarding.

They included reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men against whom the Pentagon prosecutor swore out death-penalty charges in a complex Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracy case on Feb. 11.

The proposed 90-page charge sheets list the names of 2,973 victims of the 9/11 attacks. The men have not been formally charged. Instead they are in the control of a White House appointee, Susan J. Crawford, whose title is the war court's convening authority, and her legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann.

Under the law governing the commissions, the alleged 9/11 conspirators would formally be charged 30 days after Crawford approves them.

That currently leaves a seven-month window during the 2008 election campaign.

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.

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.''

England is a two-term White House appointee. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as Navy secretary, briefly served as deputy Homeland Security secretary and then returned to the Pentagon, where he supervised the prison camps' administrative processes.

Crawford was a Republican attorney appointee in the Pentagon when Vice President Dick Cheney was defense secretary.

Hamdan's military lawyer argues that standard military justice has barriers that separate various functions, which he contends Pentagon appointees have crossed in the war court.

In April the defense team plans to call the former chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who recounted the England remark since submitting his resignation, claiming political interference.

Davis, who had approved charges against Hamdan, served as former chief Pentagon prosecutor until he resigned over what he called political interference by general counsel William J. Haynes.

Haynes has since quit.

They also want to call as a witness the deputy chief defense counsel, a retired Army lawyer named Michael Berrigan, who, according to the filing, was mistakingly sent a draft copy of 9/11 conspiracy charges being prepared by the prosecution.

In the filing, Hartmann, the legal advisor, orders Berrigan to return it, which the defense team claims illustrates the muddied role of the legal advisor.

He supervised the prosecution, announced the 9/11 conspiracy charges on Feb. 11, then said he would evaluate them independently and recommend to Crawford how to proceed.

The Mizer motion is also the latest attack on the legitimacy of war-court prosecutions by a variety of feisty uniformed defense attorneys, who have doggedly used civilian courts and courted public opinion against the process since the earliest days.

Mizer sent the brief directly to reporters for major news organizations, rather than leave it to the Office of Military Commissions to post it on a Pentagon website.

The Pentagon has been releasing motions for the public to read after they have been argued -- and ruled on by the judge.

With delays in other cases, the Hamdan case is now on track to be the first full-blown U.S. war-crimes tribunal since World War II.

The current time frame would put the trial before the Supreme Court rules on an overarching detainee rights case in June.

Hamdan's lawyer says advisor is exerting illegal sway for political ends

In a motion to dismiss the case against Bin Laden's ex-driver, he says his Navy superior is pursuing election-year convictions when he is supposed to be impartial.


MIAMI -- The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, on Thursday accused U.S. officials of trying to orchestrate war-crimes convictions for election-year political gain.

In his motion for dismissal of the case against Hamdan, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer accused Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann -- legal advisor to the White House official overseeing terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- of exercising "unlawful command influence" over both the prosecution and defense. Lawyers participating in the tribunals are members of the U.S. military, and all are subordinate in rank to Hartmann.

More than a dozen suspected senior Al Qaeda figures are among the 280 prisoners currently at Guantanamo, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

In his 97-page motion, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer cited what he said were inappropriate comments and actions by Hartmann and political appointees in the Guantanamo process -- including its top official, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority.

Hartmann "has so closely aligned himself with the prosecutorial function that he cannot continue to provide the requisite impartial advice to the convening authority," Mizer said.

Hartmann did not return messages seeking comment. But a spokesman for the tribunals, Army Maj. Robert D. Gifford, said the general had not seen the motion and would have nothing to say immediately about its allegations.

"While the Office of Military Commissions receives notice of court filings, we are not aware if such a motion has even been filed with the trial court," Gifford said. "Regardless, the proper place for the resolution of any legal matter is in the courtroom."

In the last six years, only one case against a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has reached its conclusion. Crawford, who served as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was Defense secretary, in early 2007 facilitated the plea bargain that freed Australian David Hicks.

The move was seen by many as a favor by the Bush administration to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose failure to free Hicks was hampering his reelection battle -- which he eventually lost.

The former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, quit in October after complaining that Hartmann was bringing political pressure to bear on the legal process.

The motion filed Thursday said that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II had effectively ordered Davis to ensure that the terrorism suspects all were found guilty. "We can't hold these men for six years and have acquittals. We have to have convictions," Haynes is quoted as saying when Davis mentioned that some defendants at the World War II Nuremberg trials were acquitted.

Hartmann took over as legal advisor in July and immediately began acting as "de facto chief prosecutor," Mizer wrote in his motion.

Amid grimness and beatings, a sense of change

The sprawling prison complex at Guantánamo Bay looks from a distance like many of the hastily built resorts round the Caribbean, the camps occupying a narrow strip of sand by the palm-lined sea-shore, with fencing to keep the locals out.

But through the military checkpoint, the grimness of the world's most infamous prison becomes apparent: barbed wire and watchtowers and heavy nylon matting hiding it from outside eyes.

Once inside it becomes grimmer still. Prisoners at Camp Six, where there are maximum security cells, are isolated for 22 hours a day, allowed into a small courtyard for two hours to exercise. Confrontations with guards and beatings are commonplace. Many have been tortured, if not at the camp, then before they arrived. About 10 are on hunger strike. Two have been force-fed for more than 800 days.

At Camp Six military guards, working in strict rotation, peer through peepholes at least once a minute. A prisoner, briefly glimpsed, is bedraggled, only a tiny glimmer of curiosity in his eyes at a break in the routine brought about by the presence of a handful of journalists.

A senior US medical officer at the camps, who preferred not to be named, admitted that about 10% to 15% of the prisoners were receiving treatment for medical or psychological problems, but insisted this was comparable to prisons on the US mainland.

Reporters are not allowed to speak to prisoners but lawyers can, and they regard conditions at Guantánamo as much worse than anywhere else in the US prison system. One of the lawyers, Wells Dixon, from the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, said he had been going to the camps for years and had seen a marked deterioration in prisoners' health. "Camp Six was set up to destroy them physically and mentally, and it worked," he said.

Almost seven years since the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan and five years since the occupation of Iraq, there are still 275 detainees at Guantánamo (down from a high of 775), held without trial. They have come from a wide arc stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to the Muslim regions of western China.

Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, commander in charge of the Guantánamo camps, inside the US naval base on the eastern end of Cuba, said in an interview that his conscience was clear. "I have to get up every morning and look in the mirror and believe that I am doing something that is morally and legally correct. And believe me I can do that every single morning."

Buzby claimed that many of the inmates, if not detained, "would be very actively engaged in jihad and would be doing their very best to take American and coalition lives. And the reason I know this is because they are very happy to tell us that every single day."

Lawyers questioned whether it was possible to hold a fair trial, given that some of the evidence that might be used against the prisoners had been obtained by torture. Buzby said it would be for the judge to decide whether the evidence was admissible. In contrast with the torture used in secret CIA detention centres round the world, Buzby said his preference was for interrogators building a rapport with detainees and offering incentives. "We use the Subway sandwich and the Big Mac." Asked whether he regarded waterboarding - which simulates drowning and was used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of 9/11 - as torture, he admitted: "I would certainly not want it done to me."

The prisoners react in various ways to indefinite confinement. Some are compliant, and these are mainly held in Camp Four, where they are free to wander round a small compound and chat to other inmates, can attend classes in English and have access to a library, in which one of the most read books, according to the librarian, is the latest Harry Potter in English.

Confrontation common
But confrontation is never far away. One of the guards at Camp Six, Patrick Zintel, told of how the prisoners retaliate. "They pile faeces by the door and when a guard comes in, they will throw it at them," he said. Such incidents are common enough for the US to put an eye-wash dispenser outside the cells.

Another guard, Chris Cookson, said that such incidents also occurred in the camps where the inmates are supposedly compliant. "I came out of an office and a cocktail of water, urine and faeces came out of nowhere and splattered the person in front," he said.

The guards retaliate heavily. Clive Stafford Smith, the London-based lawyer for some of the inmates and author of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, which recounts the experiences of the prisoners, said he had seen the scars from such beatings. "Sadly, the emergency reaction force [a five-strong team of guards] still responds to minor infringements by beating them up."

There is a sense of uncertainty about Guantánamo. Although the Bush administration promised that the first of the trials at Guantánamo will finally begin this year, guards and lawyers are unsure how much longer the camps will exist. All the leading candidates in the US presidential race -the two Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Republican John McCain - have promised to close Guantánamo on entering the White House on January 20 next year.

Stafford Smith predicted that Guantánamo will close rapidly and welcomed the prospect because the prisoners are likely to be moved to the US mainland where they will be subject to US law.

Defence lawyers divide the detainees into three categories. The first are those like Mohammed who could go on trial. Buzby said he expected about 80 to go on trial. Of the remainder, 80 have already been cleared for release but cannot find a country that will take them. The others are awaiting clearance.

Uncertainty
The defence department said earlier this month that Mohammed, who is held at Camp Seven, a CIA camp whose existence was only revealed this year, and five others are to be tried on charges that carry the death penalty.

Yet another camp has been built for Mohammed's trial. Camp Justice, begun in September and completed at the start of this month, consists of a windowless courthouse, holding cells and tents for 550 officials, lawyers and journalists.

Shayana Kadidal, another lawyer with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has more clients at Guantánamo than anyone else, said he thought the trial would be nowhere near completion by the time Bush leaves office. Reflecting the sense that these are the dying days of Guantánamo, the air force engineers who built Camp Justice said it could be dismantled in a month.