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.

Military lawyers assigned to defend accused 9/11 ploitters

WASHINGTON -- The chief defense counsel for the war crimes court at Guantánamo Bay on Monday appointed four U.S. military officers to defend four alleged co-conspirators facing possible death-penalty charges in the 9/11 attacks.

But Army Reserves Col. Steve David said he had not yet formally assigned a lawyer to defend their alleged ringleader, reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The assignments had been seen as a key obstacle in the Pentagon's effort to move forward with its showcase Military Commissions prosecution -- a complex, six-captive capital case alleging they organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

CHARGES FILED

The Pentagon prosecutor swore out charges against the six on Feb. 11. Now a Bush administration appointee is deciding whether to go forward and whether to make execution the ultimate penalty -- if the men are convicted in the case that lists the names of 2,973 victims in the charges sheets.

''It's daunting,'' said Navy Reserves Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, a former San Diego federal public defender called to service and now assigned to defend Ramzi bin al Shibh.

She also, separately, had been assigned another commissions case -- to defend a Sudanese man who allegedly served as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, driver and cook, Ibrahim al Qosi.

But the 9/11 case, she said, presented ``the ultimate challenge for a criminal defense attorney when a defendant is facing so much hatred from the general public -- and political backlash, to say the least.''

Bin al Shibh, who was captured on Sept. 11, 2002, is accused of organizing the German-based cell of the suicide squads that hijacked the commercial airplanes that struck the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field a year earlier.

KEY INTERMEDIARY

A citizen of Yemen, he has been described as a key intermediary between some of the hijackers and leaders of al Qaeda, in effect meaning he served as the 9/11 control officer. He also has been described as a key lieutenant to Mohammed.

Mohammed and the four other former CIA-held captives accused in the case have never seen attorneys -- military or civilian -- and are held in segregation as special ''high-value detainees'' at the remote prison camps in southeast Cuba.

They arrived there in September 2006 after years in secret U.S. custody overseas.

Now it will be up to the attorneys to get special intelligence clearances and meet with their clients to see whether they will cooperate with their U.S. military lawyers -- who are provided to them free of charge under the Military Commissions Act that created the war court in 2006.

David, in civilian life a judge in Boone County, Ind., near Indianapolis, made the appointments days after several civilian legal groups disclosed that they were organizing a defense fund and recruiting teams of top lawyers with death-penalty experience to help in the cases of Mohammed and the others accused at the war court.

The American Civil Liberties Union is spearheading the effort.

OTHER DEFENDANTS

Of the other former CIA-held detainees facing proposed capital charges:

• Walid bin Attash was assigned Navy Reserves Lt. Cmdr. James Hatcher, who has death penalty defense experience as a South Carolina federal public defender. Bin Attash, a Saudi-raised Yemeni, allegedly selected and trained some of the hijackers and allegedly scouted U.S. aircraft as early as 1999 in Malaysia as part of the plot.

• Ali Abd al Aziz Ali was assigned Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, who is already lead lawyer in the non-capital case against Osama bin Laden's former Afghanistan driver, Salim Hamdan -- whose trial is expected to start in June and last at most two weeks. Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al Baluchi, has been described as nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed who allegedly sent about $120,000 to the hijackers to cover, among other things, flight training at U.S. flight schools.

• Azzi Ali's assistant, Mustafa al Hawsawi, was assigned Army Reserves Maj. John Jackson as his defense counsel.

Only one of the six had already been assigned an attorney.

He is Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi who has been held by the military, not the CIA, but was subjected to a special course of interrogations approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It was not known whether, as of Monday, his lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles had yet to meet with him.

SPECIAL ACCESS

The others need special access from the military to see their clients because the CIA has declared as classified the details of their interrogation and detention at so-called ''black sites'' overseas.

Lachelier said that David had assured the 9/11 defense counsels that they would get a second uniformed military defense counsel -- known as ''a second chair'' -- as well as an investigator and paralegal to work on the case.

In addition, the ACLU was expected to offer each a civilian co-counsel with outside legal resources to assist in the defense.