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.

Sands: Bush’s Architects Of Torture Are ‘Weaseling Out’ Of Responsibility For ‘Crimes’

In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.

Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.

Sands cited former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who was instrumental in shredding the Geneva Conventions, as an example:

When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.



Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:

I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?

“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.

Bond Proposes Rewriting Army Field Manual To Expand Interrogation Options»

Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) hasn’t been known for criticizing the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques. In fact, his most famous comment on the issue came in December 2007, when he compared waterboarding to “swimming”:

GWEN IFILL: Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that’s beside the point. It’s not being used.

The AP reports that Bond appears to have had a change of heart and is searching for a “compromise” over how the CIA can interrogate prisoners. In a letter to fellow senators yesterday, Bond proposed explicitly outlining what tactics are banned, rather than which ones are allowed:

Rather than authorizing intelligence agencies to use only those techniques that are allowed under the AFM [Army Field Manual], I believe the more prudent approach is to preclude the use of specific techniques that are prohibited under the AFM. In this way, the Congress can state clearly that certain harsh interrogation techniques will not be permissible. At the same time, this approach allows for the possibility that new techniques that are not explicitly authorized in the AFM, but nevertheless comply with the law, may be developed in the future.

Specified prohibitions in conjunction with intelligence interrogations would include: forcing the detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee and using duct tape over the eyes; applying beatings, electric shock, burns, or similar forms of physical pain; “waterboarding”; using military working dogs; inducing hypothermia or heat injury; conducting mock executions; and depriving the detainee of adequate food, water or medical care.

Bond’s proposal isn’t much of a compromise. Sure, it would ban waterboarding. But it would also give interrogators an unprecedented amount of leeway and still permit acts such as religious desecration. What exactly constitutes “similar forms of physical pain”?

The AFM doesn’t need to be rewritten, as Bond proposes. Both FBI Director Robert Mueller and Lt. Gen. Michael Maples of the Defense Intelligence Agency have testified to Congress that the current AFM — which does not allow waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation tactics — provides them with “the tools that are necessary for the purpose under which we are conducting interrogations.”

Guantanamo judge may suspend trial for Canadian detainee

A military judge threatened to suspend the war-crimes trial of a Canadian detainee, scolding the government Thursday for failing to provide records of his confinement at Guantanamo.

Attorneys for Omar Khadr say details of his interrogations and mental health could provide grounds to suppress self-incriminating statements at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

At a pretrial hearing, Judge Peter Brownback, an Army colonel, criticized the prosecution team led by Marine Maj. Jeffrey Groharing for demanding an expedited trial despite failing to obtain the documents from the detention center.

"I have been badgered, beaten and bruised by Maj. Groharing since the 7th of November to set a trial date," Brownback said. "To get a trial date, I need to get discovery done."

His frustration highlights the dueling interests of two military entities at Guantanamo — the tribunal system, which airs the backgrounds of terror suspects in detail, and the Joint Task Force, which tightly restricts information about inmates whom officials describe as some of America's most dangerous enemies.

Brownback said he understands the military's worry that the documents might identify prison officials who fear retribution. But he ordered the government to provide the records of Khadr's day-to-day confinement by May 22, in complete or edited form, or he will suspend proceedings.

The Toronto-born Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at the age of 15 and was taken to Guantanamo four months later. In a sworn affidavit, he said he was threatened with rape and left short-shackled to a bolt in the floor for as long as six hours. He claims he was so scared that he told interrogators what they wanted to hear.

Khadr is accused of lobbing a grenade that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer during a firefight at an al-Qaida compound in eastern Afghanistan. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges including murder, conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

His Pentagon-appointed attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said he believes Khadr's treatment at Guantanamo was designed to prevent him from recanting a false confession that he made under coercion at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

"He was essentially punished for not cooperating with interrogators while at Guantanamo Bay," Kuebler said.

Failure to produce the documents could derail what was likely to be the first trial of a terror suspect at Guantanamo, where the U.S. holds about 270 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Military prosecutors say they plan to prosecute as many as 80 of the suspects.

The judge could eventually dismiss the case if the military does not deliver the documents, said Air Force Maj. Gail Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon office overseeing the tribunals.

But Kuebler said that possibility unlikely. He has urged Canada to demand Khadr's repatriation to spare him a trial he says is guaranteed to produce a conviction.

Comedy of errors as war court complex debuts

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Pentagon took its new $12 million war court complex out for a test run Wednesday with the arraignment of an alleged al Qaeda propagandist -- and the state-of-the-art facility failed.

Observers in the gallery sat behind soundproof glass while the accused, Ali Hamza Bahlul, spoke and gestured to the judge at the start of the proceedings.

But no sound was broadcast into the spectators' booth where international media, human rights observers, a Canadian diplomat and FBI agents were sequestered.

The prosecution, the accused and the military judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback II, exchanged words for several moments but the sound was not audible.

Military escorts scrambled to halt the proceedings and notify the judge -- even as the accused offered hand-written notes to the court.

Wednesday marked the debut of the Pentagon's showcase ''Expeditionary Legal Complex'' -- designed to try six alleged 9/11 co-conspirators simultaneously.

It is a maximum-security, eavesdropping-proof complex that arms security officers with a mute button to silence a defendant -- were he to blurt out a U.S. national security secret, such as where he was interrogated overseas by the CIA, or how.

But Wednesday's trial run took place during more mundane proceedings -- an effort to arraign the 39-year-old Yemeni named Bahlul as an al Qaeda co-conspirator for allegedly serving as Osama bin Laden's media secretary in Afghanistan around the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

''This was a technical difficulty; this was not a kill-switch employment issue,'' said Air Force Capt. Andre Kok, a commissions spokesman inside the soundproofed room.

An Army sergeant serving as the court technology specialist was later brought to the observers booth to explain, ''The hard-drive keeps crashing.'' They swapped out the hard drive several times and resumed the proceedings a little over an hour later.

Bahlul then launched into a one-hour monologue in Arabic. He said he did not dispute the U.S. allegations against him, pledged his allegiance to bin Laden and rejected the authority of the military court.

''I'm telling you now I will never deny any actions I did alongside bin Laden fighting you and your allies, the Jews,'' he said. ``We will continue our jihad and nothing will stop us.''

Even though the United States toppled Islamic law in its post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, he proclaimed, God will have the last word.

``He can sink the whole continent of the United States if he wants.''

Bahlul is accused of three war crimes violations at the first U.S. military tribunals since World War II: conspiracy, providing material support for terror and solicitation to commit murder.

Conviction carries a life sentence.

The session was the first since the former war crimes prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis testified in the original, older courtroom on April 28 that the Pentagon rushed the terror trials to get them going before President Bush leaves office.

Problems persisted throughout the session. At the new state-of-the-art press room adjacent to the razor-wire-ringed court complex, a closed-circuit broadcast of the proceedings froze on an image of the military judge midsentence, his mouth agape.

English translation of Bahlul's speech was at times inaudible.

Then, as the charges were read, the power was cut to the courtroom, turning the screen nearly black as an alarm sounded -- and Brownback ordered the reading to continue.

Guards surrounded the detainee, unshackled in his seat, just feet from the judge as the proceedings went on.

Throughout it all, Bahlul stonily rejected the proceedings. He alternately said he would boycott them and that he wanted to serve as his own defense counsel, a right granted by Congress in the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

He flatly refused his Pentagon appointed attorney, an Air Force Reserves major, saying he would rather represent himself at trial, silently.

The judge, however, assigned Maj. David Frakt as ''standby counsel'' -- a status that will allow him to assist the court, if the not the detainee, to organize a defense.

Bahlul sat through the morning session in his tan prison camp uniform, refusing to participate when others spoke besides himself.

He refused to enter a plea at the arraignment but earlier passed three Arabic language notes to the judge: one declaring his rejection of the court, another declaring his plan to boycott and the last affirming his ``renewal of allegiance to Osama bin Laden.''

Bahlul, who was earlier charged in an abandoned 2006 effort to stage military commissions, is seen as the godfather of the emerging movement to boycott the proceedings by enemy combatants held for as much as six years behind the razor wire at Camp Delta.

Last time, at his 2006 hearing, he fashioned a hand-drawn sign declaring, ''Muquata'a'' -- Arabic for boycott -- and rejected his U.S. military defense counsel.

At times Wednesday, he waved the old boycott sign -- provided to him by the judge.

At times he crossed his wrists in a symbol of an ''X'' -- double foul.

Bahlul is accused of being a member of bin Laden's inner circle, of preparing a propaganda video about the suicide bombing of the USS Cole destroyer off the coast of Aden, Yemen, and acting as ''personal secretary and media secretary'' of bin Laden ``in support of al Qaeda.

He also allegedly ran al Qaeda data processing and media equipment and at times served as a bin Laden bodyguard armed with a bomb belt, rifle and grenades.

Guantanamo detainee sues British government for torture info

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Attorneys for a detainee held here as an alleged al Qaeda co-conspirator filed suit against the British government on Tuesday, claiming it would violate its own foreign policy by permitting a former resident to face war crimes trial here with evidence allegedly obtained by torture.

Pentagon officials have not yet charged Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohammed, 29, with war crimes. In the last, aborted U.S. effort to stage military commissions, he was accused of planning to explode a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in New York City.

The suit seeks to extract from the British government any secret intelligence that the two war on terror allies may have exchanged in the case in a bid to prove any trial would be tainted by torture.

Pakistani security forces arrested Mohammed at the Karachi airport in April 2002. From there, his lawyers claim, he disappeared into a secret network of U.S. supported prisons -- including 18 months in Morocco between 2002 and 2004.

There, according to an affidavit his London lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, he confessed under torture to crimes he never committed.

''The torture included shackling, being suspended from walls and ceilings, brutal beatings and being cut all over his body with a scalpel, including his genitals,'' according to the 21-page petition filed Tuesday at the British High Court of Justice.

``Unsurprisingly, the claimant co-operated to avoid further torture.''

President Bush has said the United States does not engage in torture.

Under military commissions law, evidence obtained through coercion may be admitted at trial, if the military judge considers it necessary. But evidence from torture is banned, because it is illegal under both U.S. and international law.

It will be up to each detainee's judge to decide the distinction between the two once the trials get under way in the first exclusively U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II.

Mohammed lived seven years in London, starting at age 16. His family had fled his native Addis Ababa, first to the Washington, D.C., area, then to Britain.

He claims he never joined al Qaeda but confessed to crimes he never committed under torture. His lawyers say he traveled to Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on a religious journey to shake a drug habit.

His attorneys argue in the pleadings that the British government has evidence that could help Mohammed prove he was tortured and are obliged to assist in his defense under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, as well as British law.

''Mr. Mohammed has been the victim of extraordinary rendition, horrific torture, years of detention without trial, all apparently with the assistance of or, at least, the Nelsonian blindness of the British government,'' solicitor Richard Stein said, releasing the suit on behalf of the legal aid organization Reprieve. ``It beggars belief that they will not lift a finger to help a British resident when he may face the death penalty.''

Since the Bush administration opened the Guantánamo prison camps in January 2002, the British government has systematically succeeded through diplomatic channels in securing the release of its citizens plus several former legal British residents held here as ``enemy combatants.''

Some of the citizens had been earlier identified as candidates for trial by commission.

British legal experts have long argued that the U.S. war court doesn't meet international norms; some have called it a ``kangaroo court.''

Last year, it specifically included Mohammed's name on a list of detainees whose release it sought, to no avail.

Now, his attorneys suspect he will be charged as the Pentagon prosecutor revives old cases earlier halted by the Supreme Court.

In part to prove their case, the lawyers quote Mohammed as telling them from behind the razor wire at Guantánamo that in his first year of secret detention his interrogators referred to material in his case provided by the British intelligence service MI-5.

In the earlier aborted war court cases, Mohammed was among the most colorful of commission defendants.

He spoke extemporaneously at pretrial proceedings in British accented English, declared the process a ''CON-mission,'' insisted on serving as his own defense attorney and wore a Pakistani-style tunic and trousers he had his attorneys dye fluorescent orange to illustrate his prison camp attire.

In the intervening years, according to his Pentagon attorney, Air Force Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, he has declined emotionally and mentally in the isolation of this offshore Navy base, at times smearing feces on the walls of his cell and on himself to protest his conditions.

Prison camp spokesmen have confirmed the presence of a feces smearer and said he was segregated from the other ''enemy combatants'' because he was disruptive but have never identified the man under a policy they say is designed to protect a detainee's privacy.

Iraqi Sues US Contractors Over Torture

LOS ANGELES - An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors May 5, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months.

Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003.

Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as "Big Steve." The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics.

Phone messages left for Arlington, Va.-based CACI and New York City-based L-3 Communications, formerly Titan Corp., were not immediately returned May 5. There was no phone number listed for Stefanowicz at his Los Angeles address.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles because Stefanowicz lives there, seeks unspecified monetary damages.

The firms provided interrogators or interpreters to assist U.S. military guards at Abu Ghraib, which became notorious when photos made public in early 2004 showing U.S. Soldiers abusing and humiliating detainees. Military investigators later concluded that much of the abuse happened in late 2003 - when CACI and Titan's interrogators were at the prison.

CACI and L-3 were accused of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners in earlier lawsuits. In November a federal judge in the District of Columbia dismissed the suit against L-3 but allowed the one against CACI to proceed.

In an interview with The Associated Press on May 5in Istanbul, Turkey, al-Janabi said he hopes the lawsuit sheds light on what happened to him and other detainees.

"God willing the righteousness will emerge and God willing the criminal will receive his punishment," al-Janabi said.

Al-Janabi, 43, said he was detained by U.S. troops during a late-night raid in which he and his family were beaten by their captors. He said he was taken to a military base where he was stripped naked, a hood was placed on his head and his hands and legs were chained.

"They (U.S. troops) did not tell me what was the reason behind my arrest ... during the interrogation, the American Soldier told me I was a terrorist ... and I was preparing for an attack against the U.S. forces," said al-Janabi, who denied the accusation and claims he was forced to give confessions under "savage" intimidation.

The lawsuit also claims the contractors conspired in a cover-up by destroying documents and other information, hid prisoners during periodic checks by the International Red Cross and misled military and government officials about what was happening at Abu Ghraib.

Al-Janabi was released in July 2004 and wasn't charged with any crime, according to the lawsuit. He also was forced to form a human pyramid in the nude with other prisoners, according to the lawsuit, but his Philadelphia-based attorney Susan Burke said it wasn't known if he was in the infamous photo that became public.

"Most of this conduct was repeated on more than one occasion," Burke said.

At one point after passing out, al-Janabi said, he was told by an L-3 translator "welcome to Guantanamo." He said he even asked a cellmate whether he could see the ocean from a window.

"I lost the sense of time after the prolonged hours of abusive interrogation and thought that I was transported to Guantanamo," al-Janabi told the AP.

The Abu Ghraib photos drew international criticism about the way detainees were treated and damaged the U.S. military's image in Arab countries. Eleven U.S. Soldiers were convicted of crimes at the prison, which was closed and transferred to Iraqi control.