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Paul Merrell

Senior Defense Dept. officials decry Guantánamo judge's female guard ban | Mi... - 0 views

  • The Pentagon’s top two leaders on Tuesday decried as “outrageous” an Army judge’s nine-month-old ban on female guards touching the five alleged 9/11 conspirators as they move them to and from court and legal meetings.Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, criticized the ban in response to a question from New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. Ayotte and two other GOP senators visited the prison Friday, and said they met with female guards upset by the restriction.
  • “I think it is counter to the way we treat service members, including women service members, and outrage is a very good word for it,” Carter said, incorrectly attributing the ban to a federal judge — not the chief of the war court judiciary, Army Col. James L. Pohl.The five alleged Sept. 11 plotters complained through their lawyers last year that Islamic and traditional doctrine require they have no physical contact with women other than family members. They claimed that, until a year ago, prison commanders had provided the religious accommodation of not being touched by female soldiers.
  • Pentagon-paid U.S. defense attorneys got Pohl to issue an emergency, temporary restraining order against the use of female guards in January, pending testimony and legal arguments on the subject.As it happens, Pohl has listed the ban on this week’s docket for pretrial hearings in the case of the five men facing a joint death-penalty trial as the alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Whether it would actually be heard, however, was unclear because the majority of the current session’s 40-item agenda has been sidelined by one alleged plotter’s interest in functioning as his own defense attorney.
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  • A military lawyer for the alleged plot mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, said the remarks were troubling in light of the Senate Torture Report showing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques included sexual humiliation.“These men have been subjected by the U.S. government to documented, systematic sexualized attack on their Islamic identity,” Marine Maj. Derek Poteet, Mohammed’s detailed military counsel, told the Miami Herald. “So forced touching by guards of the opposite sex is extremely inappropriate.” Poteet also called it “also extraordinarily inappropriate for these respected military and civilian leaders to inject themselves into the matters that are currently in litigation in a military commission by a military judge, raising the specter of unlawful command influence.”
  • Since the Pentagon opened the war-on-terror prison camps here in 2002, female guards routinely escorted most of the prisoners to and from appointments, classes, everything but showers. But the 9/11 defendants got here in 2006, and are segregated in the secret Camp 7 since their transfer from CIA black sites, where they were subjected to sexual humiliation.
  • Later, at a press conference, she characterized the ban as a manipulation of the U.S. legal system by “the worst of the worst.”“As the women guards at Guantánamo told us, they just want to do their jobs,” she said. “And they can’t believe that we are allowing terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 people to dictate how U.S. service members do their jobs — simply because they are women.”
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    Senator Ayotte: "And they can't believe that we are allowing terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 people to dictate how U.S. service members do their jobs - simply because they are women." Hey, Senator, did you ever hear of the presumption of innocence? These guys haven't been tried and convicted. Given that they are not Israeli, I'd say they stand a fair chance of acquittal.
Paul Merrell

Secret program at secret Guantánamo prison hears everything | Miami Herald - 0 views

  • A secret Defense Department program provides unfettered eavesdropping on the accused terrorists imprisoned at Guantánamo’s clandestine Camp 7 lockup, recently released war court documents show.Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge in 9/11 trial, discovered the existence of the secret surveillance program during a recent war court hearing. Little is publicly known about the program, not even its unclassified two-word nickname.
  • The disclosure of pervasive eavesdropping at Guantánamo’s lockup for 14 former CIA prisoners comes in before-and-after documents released by the court from the recent Oct. 19-30 pretrial hearings in the death-penalty case of five men accused of orchestrating the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.At issue was accused 9/11 plotter Walid bin Attash’s request for guidance on how he could function as his own attorney. Bin Attash is a Yemeni in his mid-30s who is accused of training some of the hijackers. “You must assume anything you say in Camp 7 is not confidential and will be disclosed to the U.S. Government,” warns an Oct. 23 draft of the advisory, crafted after the judge was informed of the covert program. “Only when you are in Echo 2 will anything you say be covered by the attorney-client privilege.”An Oct. 20 draft of the advisory omits those lines.
  • This is not the first time in the proceedings that a surveillance program caught Pohl by surprise. In January 2013, he ordered the CIA to unplug a button that allowed an unseen observer to cut the court’s audio feed to the public. Perhaps ironically, the lone site the judge considers safe for consultative trial preparation — the Camp Echo compound of wooden huts, each containing a cell — at one time had covert recording devices that looked like smoke detectors. The judge ordered them disabled in February 2013.Attorney Dror Ladin of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was an observer at the Guantánamo hearings last month, said the apparent disclosure of “pervasive surveillance at Camp 7” is the latest issue to challenge the possibility of a fair trial.“It is shocking that for years neither defense counsel nor the judge were made aware that the government was capturing everything said aloud by the detainees there,” he said Thursday. It also adds to mounting questions of “how these military commissions can produce a fair result,” said Ladin, especially if one of the men represents himself. “These are detainees who really can’t see the evidence against them and simultaneously have been provided no rehabilitation services for the torture they suffered for years. It would be astonishing if any of them could craft a fair defense for capital charges.”
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  • A defense attorney in another case said the prosecution wants to use a surreptitiously recorded conversation between two Camp 7 captives against an alleged al-Qaida commander. And in 2012 the journalist Daniel Klaidman wrote in his book “Kill or Capture” that the U.S. government had recordings made in a Guantánamo prison recreation yard of the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed talking about evidence that could be used against him.The latest disclosure comes at a time of decreasing transparency at the war court.On Oct. 29, the judge held a 13-minute secret session without advanced notice to the public. A day later the judge wrote in a three-page ruling that he closed the court at the request of “the Government” — war-court-speak for the prosecution — to protect state secrets whose disclosure “could result in grave danger to national security.”Pohl also ordered the court to issue a censored transcript of the parts the excluded public and accused would be allowed to see. No transcript has been released.Then the next day, Oct. 30, the judge held a daylong, open hearing on a restraining order he issued forbidding female guards from touching the 9/11 accused when they are being taken to court or legal meetings. The judge’s order has outraged members of Congress and the Pentagon brass.
  • In that public court hearing, soldiers called as witnesses from the prison discussed staffing patterns at Camp 7. Normally the Pentagon releases transcripts of open hearings the same day. Unusually, the court has not yet released the Oct. 30 transcript. A Pentagon spokesman suggested Thursday — 13 days after the open court hearing — that somebody was scrubbing the transcript of information already made public. “The security review of the Oct. 30 transcript remains ongoing,” said Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross. “We will provide an update once additional information becomes available.”Much of the October session focused on bin Attash’s question about how he’d act as his own lawyer in a system that does not let the accused terrorist see classified information in the case. The judge and attorneys devoted days to designing a script Pohl would read to any accused 9/11 terrorist who tries to take charge of his defense — and spent a full afternoon huddling in a closed meeting on the secret program.
  • In it, Pohl made clear that he never intended to let bin Attash dismiss his Pentagon-paid defense attorneys — Chicago criminal defense attorney Cheryl Bormann and Air Force Maj. Michael Schwartz. Instead, the script shows Pohl planned to appoint Bormann and Schwartz as “standby counsel” the judge could activate to carry out cross-examination of certain witnesses who might have “particular sensitivities” to being questioned by the alleged terrorist.“If you are represented by lawyers, then it is the lawyers, and not you, who will conduct the defense,” the warning says. “Correspondingly, if you represent yourself, you will be able to perform the lawyer’s core functions, but you will not necessarily be allowed to direct special appearances by counsel when it is convenient to you.”The language suggests a far more limited role by the American lawyers than those carried out in an aborted attempt to hold the Sept. 11 trial during the Bush administration. In those proceedings, alleged 9/11 terrorists serving as their own lawyer regularly had standby counsel write and argue motions in court.The script also envisions a scenario in which an accused 9/11 plotter serving as his own lawyer becomes unruly, disruptive or disobedient rather than respect “the dignity of the courtroom.” In such a case, the judge said he could deal with “obstructionist misconduct” by putting “physical restraints” on bin Attash or ejecting him from the court.Bin Attash, for his part, has not been noticeably disruptive across years of pretrial proceedings. An amputee, he was brought to his May 5, 2012 arraignment in a Guantánamo prison restraint chair routinely used for forced-feeding of hunger strikers — with guards carrying his prosthetic leg separately.
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    It's long past time to recognize that the military cannot provide a fair trial for GITMOI detainees, transfer them to the U.S., and try them in a civilian Article II court. If this kind of crap were going down before an Article II judge, those conducting the surveillance would be sitting in jail. 
Paul Merrell

Former public testimony disappears from Guantánamo transcripts | Miami Herald - 0 views

  • For hours on a Friday, a staff sergeant using the fake name “Jinx” testified in open court about her yearlong work here at a prison for suspected terrorists once considered the CIA’s prized war-on-terror captives.
  • The few reporters who went to court or watched on video feeds from Guantánamo to Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as a dozen legal observers and the mother and sister of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, heard her say all that in open court. But as far as the public court record is concerned, those things were never said.
  • In a first for the war court, intelligence agencies scrubbed those and other facts — including questions asked by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl — from a 379-page transcript of the Oct. 30 pretrial hearing in the 9/11 death-penalty case. A Miami Herald examination counted more than 130 pages with blacked out public testimony. Of them, 37 pages are completely redacted in the latest challenge to the remote war court’s motto, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.” Typically the court releases the transcripts “word for word with no redactions,” chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters Saturday, defending the “rare” exception of “ex-post redactions” as a security necessity.“I have not encountered it actually thus far for a transcript to be redacted. But there is a rule that enables that,” he said. “The government is fully entitled to look and say in the aftermath … ‘It ought to be protected, it could be damaging.’”
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  • At issue on Oct. 30 was Pohl’s January restraining order forbidding female guards from touching the alleged Sept. 11 plotters as they come and go from court and legal meetings, an accommodation to their Islamic traditions. The restriction recently sparked outrage among top Pentagon brass and some in Congress. The issue is unlikely to be resolved before a closed session in February to hear classified testimony.But now, in light of the retroactive redacting, case lawyers and the Sept. 11 trial judge will spend Monday huddling in closed court — no public, none of the accused conspirators listening — as they discuss how to go forward with the testimony on Pohl’s controversial restraining order.Yale Law School lecturer Eugene Fidell, whose specialty has long been military justice, said the court has a 40-second audio delay to the public and a security officer assigned to block the feed with white noise and warned that the after-the-fact censorship could be “the new normal.”
  • “The military has a real allergy to transparency,” said Fidell after declaring himself dumfounded by the effort to “sanitize stuff that has already been uttered in open court.”“Obviously there are things that can and must be kept secret,” he said. “But to try to get the genie back in the bottle for information that has already been uttered in a public proceeding — especially where there’s a time delay to protect classified information — is preposterous.”
Paul Merrell

U.S. Deploys Marines to Syria for Raqqa Operation Into Highly Disputed - Congested Thea... - 0 views

  • The United States deployed U.S. Marines to northeastern Syria to provide artillery support for local forces in the upcoming assault against Islamic State in Raqqa. Turkey criticized the U.S. for supporting Syrian YPG/YPJ forces which Turkey designates as PKK-linked terrorists. So far, the Syrian government has not officially criticized the deployment but complained that Turkish forces targeted Syrian troops in Manbij. Turkey, for its part, has launched major operations against the PKK.
  • The deployment of U.S. Marines to the region prompted disputes between Turkey and the United States. One of the central issues is the question whether U.S. troops should back the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which are dominated by the PYD and its military wings, the YPG and the all female YPJ, or whether the U.S. troops should back Turkish-led fighters under the umbrella of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA). The dispute happens as Turkish, Syrian, Russian, and U.S. troops and the various factions are preparing the assault on an estimated 4,000 fighters of the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, IS, Daesh) who are controlling the city of Raqqa. Any of these troops, the newly deployed U.S. Marines included, are entering a highly contested and highly congested theater. The contingent of U.S. Marines arrives Thursday. Their role is to provide artillery support, most probably for the SDF which already have U.S. Special Forces and “advisers” deployed among their ranks. After the arrival of the U.S. troops on Thursday, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that Turkish forces would strike the PYD’s YPG/YPJ forces in Manbij. This would imply that Turkey would carry out strikes against forces which already have Special Forces from Turkey’s NATO ally USA amidst their ranks. However, Cavusoglu argued that the Kurdish occupation of the town of Manbij and or Raqqa are a hindrance to what he describes as Turkish efforts to carve out a safe zone in northern Syria. Cavusoglu gave no deadline though for an attac but accused Washington of being confused in its planning for an attack on the IS stronghold of Raqqa.
  • The deployment marks an escalation of U.S. military involvement in Syria. Several hundred Special Operations troops have been advising the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Last weekend, some of those Special Forces, a hundred U.S. Rangers, deployed in Manbij in a bid to deter clashes between YPG fighters and Turkish-led fighters. The deployment comes as the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump debates a Raqqa plan drafted by Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the U.S. commander overseeing the campaign against the Islamic State. However, on Thursday the top U.S. commander in the Middle East signalled that there will be a larger and longer American military presence in Syria, allegedly to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State group and quell friction within the complicated mix of warring factions there. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, told Senators that he will need more conventional U.S. forces to insure stability once the fight to defeat Islamic State militants in their self-declared capital of Raqqa is over. The U.S. military, he said, can’t just leave once the fight is over because the Syrians will need help keeping IS out and ensuring the peaceful transition to local control.
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  • Surprisingly, the Syrian government has not lodged a formal complaint against the latest deployment. U.S. troops are operating in Syria without a mandate from the UN Security Council or an “official” invitation from Syria. It may be that an “unofficial” or classified agreement has been reached involving Syria, Russia and the USA, but so far no verifiable information about such an agreement has been made available to the press. However, there have been Syrian complaints about Turkish activities. A Syrian military source said on Thursday that Turkish military forces targeted positions held by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) allied forces in Manbij with artillery and rockets. The Turkish shelling reportedly targeted border guard checkpoints and claimed several lives. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Erdogan, for their part, met in an attempt to bolster Turkish – Russian relations. Adding complexity to the highly volatile situation is that the Syrian PYD and its military wings, the YPG / YPJ are traditional allies of Turkey’s Kurdistan Worker’s party (PKK). The PKK as well as the PYD have functioned as a Russian / Syrian / and in part Iranian version of what NATO forces would describe as stay-behinds (or proxies).
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