[Pnews] Guantánamo defense attorneys want CIA names to prepare USS Cole case

[Prisoner News]

  Guantánamo defense attorneys want CIA names to prepare USS Cole case


Read more here: 
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/09/4049360/guantanamo-defense-attorneys-we.html#storylink=cpy


      By Carol Rosenberg

*http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/09/4049360/guantanamo-defense-attorneys-we.html*
*Corporate Media Source*


      crosenberg at MiamiHerald.com <mailto:crosenberg at MiamiHerald.com>

Just-released transcripts of a secret session at the Guantánamo war 
court show defense lawyers want a list of the countries where the CIA 
secretly jailed the alleged USS Cole bomber, and the names of people who 
worked at the agency's black sites. But the prosecution won't provide them.

The tug-of-war over transparency emerged days after the Senate voted to 
declassify 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4037714/mcclatchy-senate-panel-finds-cia.html> 
a portion of an investigation of the so-called CIA Torture Program that 
could contain some of the answers sought by lawyers for Saudi Abd al 
Rahim al Nashiri before his death-penalty trial.

Defense lawyers have security clearances that allow them to know certain 
aspects of the still-secret CIA Rendition, Detention and Interrogation 
program. But they aren't entitled to a list of nations and names as they 
prepare for Nashiri's Dec. 4 death penalty tribunal, case prosecutor 
Navy Cmdr Andrea Lockhart said in a transcript 
<http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2014/04/04/20/05/h2pRP.So.56.pdf> 
of the closed Feb. 22 Guantánamo hearing posted on the Pentagon's war 
court website Friday evening.

Lockhart told the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/28/2773674/911-judge-has-handled-tough-cases.html>, 
the defense does not have the right to "double-check the government's 
work, and they certainly don't have the right to do their own 
independent investigation" of what happened to Nashiri.

Defense lawyers argue otherwise. They want to independently reconstruct 
what happened to Nashiri in secret confinement --- between his capture 
in Dubai in 2002 and transfer to Guantánamo four years later for this 
trial by military commission --- to challenge the integrity of certain 
evidence and to argue his mistreatment disqualifies a death penalty.

The CIA waterboarded him, and an internal abuse investigation showed its 
agents also interrogated Nashiri while he was nude; they also threatened 
him with a revving power drill, handgun and threats to sexually assault 
his mother.

The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, has already noted 
that the Obama administration revamped the tribunal to prohibit use of 
involuntary interrogations at trial. In the transcript, Lockhart says 
all mistreatment of Nashiri is now in the public domain.

The defendant, just like the public, was excluded from two closed 
hearings in February where the judge and lawyers invoked the classified 
information the defense is allowed to know in trial preparation.

The Pentagon released the heavily censored transcript six weeks later.

Defense lawyers argue the who, what, where and how are critical to 
efforts to exclude statements Nashiri made at Guantánamo ostensibly 
voluntarily in his fourth year of U.S. custody without benefit of an 
attorney.

"The name of the country or whatever particular location is not relevant 
for the purposes of what occurred, " Lockhart argued. Who, what, where 
and when don't matter, she said, "at the end of the day when you boil it 
down, what matters is what happened to the accused."

Once Nashiri got to Guantánamo, the Justice Department had "clean teams" 
question him in a less coercive setting, and the military brought him 
before a panel 
<http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2008/04/16/18/Nashiri.source.prod_affiliate.56.mp3> 
to question him and confirm his status as an "enemy combatant."

At the closed hearing Feb. 22, Nashiri's long-time defense lawyer argued 
CIA agents so fundamentally dismantled their prisoner's personality with 
"enhanced interrogation" program that he told investigators what they 
wanted to hear.

"The guy that was arrested is dead," said Rick Kammen, Nashiri's lawyer 
since 2008. "They haven't killed his body but they've killed whoever 
that guy was. Because that's what this program was designed to do, it 
was designed to turn people into a state of learned helplessness where 
they were powerless to say no to government agents."

Navy Cmdr Brian Mizer, another Nashiri lawyer, told the Miami Herald 
this week that an investigation of the treatment should determine 
whether any of Nashiri's answers to questions at Guantánamo were truly 
voluntary: "You have to get back to the past to determine whether this 
is just a dog barking on command."

A military medical board has diagnosed 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/01/3428534/guantanamo-captive-accused-in.html> 
Nashiri, 49, a self-described former millionnaire merchant from Mecca, 
as having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a Major Depressive Disorder.

Nashiri, at times described by the Bush administration as the al-Qaida's 
chief of Persian Gulf operations, is accused of orchestrating the Oct. 
12, 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen. Two men in a 
bomb-laden skiff motored up alongside the warship at Aden harbor and 
blew themselves up, killing 17 U.S. sailors.

Because the now-defunct black site program is still classified, the 
government contends, even defense lawyers with security clearances, 
aren't entitled to the details. If Nashiri happens to remember the 
places he was kept, he can volunteer the details to his lawyers. But 
separately defense lawyers cannot discuss with him 14 percent 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/24/3957849/uss-cole-defense-lawyers-you-cant.html> 
of the so-called discovery in his case because it is classified at a 
level that Nashiri can't hear about it, according to prosecutors.

At issue now is how much trial preparation the defense lawyers are 
allowed to do.

They want to interview officials who worked at the black sites, comb 
through manifests and read approved Standard Operating Procedures on 
so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that spelled out how to 
waterboard Nashiri in secret custody. And they want to know which 
countries hosted the CIA prisons.

Kammen explained it to the judge this way: "If there is an SOP as to how 
you are going to do a torture and it wasn't followed, that would be 
really important to know."

To do otherwise, Kammen told the judge, would be unethical.

Prosecutor Lockhart disagreed. "If he was waterboarded, regardless of 
whether the government said it is right or wrong, is that going change 
the nature of the ability to present that to the members? It is not. 
What matters is what was done to him, regardless if somebody said it was 
OK or not."

Government censors blacked out names, paragraphs and large portions of 
the argument from the transcript including several lines after Kammen 
says, "What we want, Your Honor, are the names of witnesses, witnesses 
who participated in the torture."

The for-public portion picks up with: "What could possibly be more 
mitigating than that? And if a doctor was part of that, if a 
psychologist was part of that, and they were being paid by the United 
States, that is mitigating in the context of a case where the United 
States is now seeking to kill the guy they did it to."

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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