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A Former Guantánamo Prisoner’s New Life
  + stars: | 2024-05-09 | by ( Carol Rosenberg | Natalie Keyssar | ) www.nytimes.com   time to read: +1 min
On the 15th night of Ramadan in a suburb of Belize City, Majid Khan and his family of four sat down for a traditional iftar meal to break the daylight hours fast. There was a leg of a lamb that Majid, a former Guantánamo detainee, had slaughtered himself, sweets brought by a sister in Maryland, dates from Saudi Arabia. The talk was small, about whether the biryani dish was too spicy and how the lamb was perfectly roasted. For two decades, this family meal was not possible. He pleaded guilty and became a government cooperator — and, all that time, his wife waited for him in Pakistan.
Persons: Majid Khan, Majid, Hamza, Rabia, Manaal, Khan, Organizations: Central Locations: Belize City, Maryland, Saudi Arabia, Central American, Al Qaeda, Belize, Indonesia, United States, Guantánamo, Pakistan
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are still negotiating toward a plea agreement for the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite the Biden administration’s refusal to endorse certain proposed conditions, the lead prosecutor said in court on Wednesday at Guantánamo Bay. “This is all whirling around us,” said Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the prosecutor, discussing key details of the negotiations in open court for the first time. He added that “around the edges we have agreed to do things” and that “the positions that we took at the time are still available.”In mostly secret negotiations in 2022 and 2003, prosecutors offered to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for detailed admissions by the accused architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other men who are charged as his accomplices in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. Since then, one of the five men has been ruled not mentally competent to stand trial. The occasion of the briefing was a legal filing by lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the defendants and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, asking the judge to dismiss the case or at least the possibility of a death penalty because of real or apparent political interference by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and other members of Congress last summer.
Persons: Biden, , Clayton G, Trivett Jr, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ammar al, Mohammed’s, Ted Cruz Organizations: Republican Locations: Guantánamo, Texas
Regardless of the outcome of their someday trial, the men accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, can be held forever as prisoners in the war against terrorism in a form of preventive detention, a military prosecutor told the presiding judge on Wednesday. He has been held since 2003. The argument, in a pretrial hearing in the decade-old Sept. 11 case, was the latest installment over a long-running, unresolved question of whether a prisoner, once he completes a war crimes sentence, is entitled to release from military detention. Col. Joshua S. Bearden, an Army prosecutor, said the answer was no. He urged the judge to reject the request as both premature, because the government is seeking the death penalty in the case, and beyond the scope of his authority.
Persons: Mustafa al, Joshua S, Bearden Organizations: Defense Locations: United States
In a protest over tougher security measures at the Guantánamo Bay prison, a lawyer for the man accused of plotting the U.S.S. Cole bombing asked a judge on Tuesday to have the prisoner unshackled during legal meetings, invoking his torture by the C.I.A. Guards let the man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, meet his lawyers more than 150 times while he was unshackled from 2019 until late last year, said Lt. Cmdr. Now the change has re-traumatized the prisoner and impeded his lawyers’ ability to communicate and work with him. “We are asking to be in the room with him unshackled as we were for four and a half years,” Commander Piette said.
Persons: Cole, Abd al, Rahim, Cmdr, Alaric Piette, , unshackled, Piette, Nashiri Organizations: Guards, Locations: Guantánamo
wanted him to discuss Al Qaeda’s future plans, not the attacks that had horrified America a year and a half earlier, Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist, said. So when the prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mentioned Sept. 11, they would slam him, naked, into a wall. That month, interrogators would waterboard Mr. Mohammed 183 times at a secret overseas C.I.A. prison in the mistaken belief, Dr. Mitchell said, that a nuclear attack in the United States was imminent. But Mr. Mohammed still was not saying what his captors wanted to hear.
Persons: Al Qaeda’s, James E, Mitchell, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mr, Mohammed, ” Dr Locations: America, United States
On Wednesday, Dr. James E. Mitchell told a stunned courtroom that episode had not happened. “I didn’t say anything about killing his son,” said Dr. Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist who in 2003 waterboarded Mr. Mohammed 183 times for the C.I.A. “He didn’t have sons until later.”Dr. Mitchell later acknowledged he had forgotten his threat. But the episode underscores a new challenge for the military court in the case against four prisoners who are accused of conspiring in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001: the fading memories and unavailability of witnesses whose testimony is central to getting the death-penalty case to trial. Testimony and other evidence often deteriorate over time, which is one reason that criminal defendants and their victims are entitled to a speedy trial.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, James E, Mitchell, , Mr, Mohammed, ” Dr Organizations: Air Force Locations: U.S
Prosecutors told relatives of victims of the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that the U.S. government made a plea deal with two Malaysian prisoners to try to disentangle the legacy of torture from the eventual trial of the prisoner they accuse of being the mastermind of the Al Qaeda-linked attacks. The two Malaysians provided secret testimony at the time of their sentencing last month. The legacy of torture has complicated prosecutors’ efforts to hold trials in the better known Sept. 11 and U.S.S. Cole bombing cases at Guantánamo. All of it has been fodder for defense lawyers trying to discredit evidence prosecutors hope to use at the war crimes trials.
Persons: Al, Cole Locations: Bali , Indonesia, Al Qaeda, Indonesian, Bali, C.I.A
One of the longest-serving prosecutors in the Sept. 11, 2001, case is stepping down, citing the pressure of his repeated trips to Guantánamo Bay on him and his family. The prosecutor, Edward R. Ryan, is a Justice Department lawyer who served on a team of civilian and military prosecutors who for 15 years have sought to start the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of conspiring in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. Mr. Ryan’s decision was seen as a sign that the case would not be going to trial anytime soon. He represented the government at the prisoners’ original court appearance at Guantánamo in 2008 and participated in nearly all the pretrial hearings since then. On Wednesday, Mr. Ryan told family members of victims of the attacks by email that he was leaving “with the heaviest heart” to return to North Carolina, where he was a federal prosecutor before his Guantánamo assignment.
Persons: Edward R, Ryan, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ryan’s Organizations: Justice Department, Pentagon Locations: New York, Pennsylvania, Guantánamo, North Carolina
Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two prisoners who conspired in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a U.S. military jury assembled at Guantánamo Bay to deliberate their sentence. The prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes charges for conspiring with an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out the attack. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother. Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, in the bombing and other “terrorist activities worldwide” left him despising “over 20 percent of the world population, Muslims. I’m a religious person, and the hate-filled person I have become is certainly not what I wanted.”
Persons: Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, Mohammed Nazir Bin, , Solomon Lamagni, Miller, Nathaniel Dan Miller, Christopher Snodgrass, Deborah, despising, I’m Organizations: Al Locations: Bali , Indonesia, Al Qaeda, London, Glendale, Ariz
Frank Heffernan thought his daughter Megan was in South Korea where she was working as an English teacher when he heard the news of a devastating terrorist attack on the Indonesian island of Bali on Oct. 12, 2002. She had gone there with friends on a vacation. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her,” said Mr. Heffernan, mopping his eyes with a tissue at his home in Florida. In the random, cruel fashion of terrorism, the bombing killed tourists and workers from 22 nations who happened to be in a commercial district, including 38 Indonesians. Among the dead were Australian and British citizens who were there for a rugby match, Americans passionate about surfing — and Megan and two Korean friends, who were out sightseeing when the bombs exploded.
Persons: Frank Heffernan, Megan, Megan Heffernan, , Heffernan Organizations: State Department, Al Locations: South Korea, Indonesian, Bali, Alaska, Al Qaeda, Florida
But pretrial proceedings for four men accused of conspiring in the plot are now in their second decade. For most hearings, the prosecutors bring about 10 people who were injured or lost family members in the attacks to watch the proceedings. Over the years, more than 150 of the people who were killed on Sept. 11 have been represented in the hearings by relatives. Some family members have come looking for answers about why the United States was so vulnerable then. Some come simply to represent a loved one who was killed in an attack that, for some Americans, has become as distant as the one at Pearl Harbor.
Persons: Osama Locations: U.S, United States, Pearl
The move comes as prosecutors have considered new ways to counter claims by defense lawyers that torture by the C.I.A. interrogations of Mr. Mohammed and his accused accomplices to produce confessions the government considers its most important trial evidence. It also shed light on an eavesdropping operation whose existence has until now never been formally acknowledged. vouched for a transcript of Mr. Mohammed describing how he learned when the hijackers would strike. Under a classified prison program, more than a dozen suspected terrorists, who had been subjected to years of solitary confinement and tortured by the C.I.A., were granted an hour of recreation time in earshot of another isolated prisoner.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mohammed Locations: Iraqi American, Guantánamo, earshot
A former Guantanamo detainee alleges that Ron DeSantis force-fed him while he was on a hunger strike. But Ron DeSantis was a junior officer as a Navy lawyer at the time. An ex-colonel told the New York Times that DeSantis would have been stuck doing grunt work. download the app Email address Sign up By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Another lawyer told the Times that DeSantis was doing low-level grunt work at the time.
Persons: Ron DeSantis, , DeSantis, Morris Davis, Mansoor Adayfi, Adayfi, Matthew Rosenberg, Carol Rosenberg, Piers Morgan Organizations: New York Times, Service, Guantanamo, US Navy, Air Force, The New York Times, Times Locations: Guantanamo
A military judge ruled on Thursday that a defendant in the Sept. 11 case who was tortured by the C.I.A. was ineligible for a death-penalty trial, adopting a finding that the prisoner was too psychologically damaged to help defend himself. Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, disqualified Ramzi bin al-Shibh, 51, from what had been a five-defendant conspiracy case in an 11-page ruling on Thursday evening. Mr. bin al-Shibh was charged as an accomplice in the attacks that killed 2,976 people, and is accused of helping organize a cell of hijackers in Hamburg, Germany, whose leader commandeered Flight No. 11 and flew it into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Persons: Matthew N, McCall, Ramzi bin al, bin, Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Organizations: World Trade Locations: Hamburg, Germany
Prosecutors have issued a new deadline — Sept. 18 — for four detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to show their willingness to plead guilty to plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and receive a maximum punishment of life in prison. The fifth defendant in the case has been found incompetent to stand trial and is likely to be removed from the case. Without a challenge, the judge is expected to sever him from the case when hearings resume next week after a 22-month hiatus. They describe the deadline as driven by the scheduled Oct. 7 departure of the current overseer of the case, Jeffrey D. Wood. In March 2022, Mr. Wood authorized prosecutors to pursue guilty pleas that would spare the defendants a capital trial to resolve the long-running case.
Persons: Ramzi bin al, Prosecutors, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Jeffrey D, Wood Organizations: Mr Locations: Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
In late 2006, in an effort to turn the page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration began an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They set up teams of law enforcement officers to try to obtain voluntary confessions from men who had spent years in brutal conditions in isolated C.I.A. A military judge declared that experiment a failure, at least in one case. In a wide-ranging ruling, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. threw out a confession that federal agents at Guantánamo Bay obtained in 2007 from a Saudi prisoner who is accused of plotting the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. But Mr. Nashiri, who was arrested in 2002, had spent four years in secret C.I.A.
Persons: George W, Bush, Lanny J, Acosta Jr, Cole, Abd al, Rahim, Nashiri, Organizations: Saudi Locations: Aden, Yemen, U.S
The finding is the latest setback to prosecution efforts to bring the long-running capital cases at Guantánamo Bay to trial. Last week, a military judge threw out the confession of a man accused of plotting the U.S.S. The question of Mr. bin al-Shibh’s sanity, and capacity to help his lawyers defend him, has shadowed the Sept. 11 conspiracy case since his first court appearance in 2008. He has disrupted pretrial hearings over the years with outbursts, and in court and in filings complained that the C.I.A. The five men are accused of conspiring in the plane hijackings in 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
Persons: Ramzi bin al, bin, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Organizations: Pentagon Locations: Cole, New York City, Pennsylvania
In the nearly 12 years since a prisoner was charged in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship, eight parents of the 17 fallen American sailors have died waiting for a trial to begin. Late this June, just two members of that group were there — a sailor’s father and a naval officer who survived the blast. The bombing of the Cole never garnered the attention of Guantánamo’s better-known prosecution of the five men who are accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the Cole attack came first, on Oct. 12, 2000.
Persons: Cole, Guantánamo’s Locations: U.S, Ukraine
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected a bid by a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay to have a new military jury reconsider his life sentence for conspiring to commit war crimes as a propaganda chief for Al Qaeda and an aide to Osama bin Laden. Earlier appeals struck down two of the three crimes for which Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted in 2008. His lawyer, Michel Paradis, had argued that a new sentencing jury should be assembled at the base to hear evidence and arguments on whether his remaining conspiracy conviction deserved a lesser sentence. Mr. Paradis also sought reconsideration of the sentence because, a year after Mr. Bahlul’s trial, Guantánamo’s military commission system was overhauled to explicitly prohibit the use of evidence “obtained by the use of torture or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the sentence should stand and that the prisoner’s lawyers brought up the question of torture too late in the appellate process.
Persons: Osama bin Laden, Ali Hamza al, Bahlul, Michel Paradis, Paradis, Bahlul’s, , Organizations: Al, U.S ., Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit Locations: Guantánamo, Al Qaeda
The last 30 detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, are being held by the United States under circumstances that constitute “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law,” a United Nations Human Rights investigator said on Monday. She issued the report one month before her term as rapporteur ends. She said the conditions at the prison “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”Ms. Aolain was the first United Nations investigator to be granted access to the detention center in its two-decade history. She said in an interview that she met with a cross section of the 34 prisoners who were there in February, including former C.I.A. detainees who are facing criminal charges and others who have been approved for transfer to other nations.
Persons: , Fionnuala Ni, Ms, Aolain Organizations: United Nations Human, United Nations Locations: Guantánamo, United States, Minnesota
Why It Matters: Criticism of Guantánamo Bay is mounting, again. The report could be presented to a sentencing jury of U.S. military officers in Mr. Nashiri’s case. In October 2021, a military jury in the case of another Guantánamo prisoner who was tortured by the C.I.A. Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers describe him as a torture survivor who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other conditions attributed to untreated physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Mr. Nashiri has more hearings this month focused on what evidence can be used at his eventual capital trial.
Persons: Biden, Cole, Abd al Rahim, Janet Hamlin, Nashiri, Katie Carmon Organizations: International Committee, Pentagon, Associated Press Locations: Guantánamo, America, U.S, Aden Harbor, United States
More than 20 years have elapsed since the attacks in Bali and Jakarta killed more than 200 people, seven of them Americans. The three men have been in U.S. custody for nearly two decades, starting in C.I.A. But the lawyers and judge are still trying to figure out what portions of the proceedings are supposed to be secret. Secrecy permeates the proceedings like no other American court. It is enough time for prosecutors to signal to a court security officer, who is schooled in C.I.A.
The body, which has no enforcement mechanism, also found that Abu Zubaydah had been denied a meaningful review of his detention and so was being unlawfully held. “The appropriate remedy would be to release Mr. Zubaydah immediately and accord him an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations, in accordance with international law,” the group said in an opinion. In 2019, Abu Zubaydah drew sketches of how he was tortured. Image Abu Zubaydah. The report criticized six other nations where the United States held Abu Zubaydah — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco and Lithuania.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — For hearings in the destroyer Cole bombing case this month, the Guantánamo war court was mostly empty. Skeletal teams for the prosecution and the defense sat in the cavernous chamber, silently watching an 80-inch screen over the witness stand. On it lawyers argued and witnesses testified from a secret courtroom 1,300 miles to the north outside Washington. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created a war crimes court at Guantánamo to be out of reach of the U.S. courts. But now, increasingly, lawyers are examining witnesses and making arguments in the remote annex — four miles from the Supreme Court and 10 miles from C.I.A.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A senior official with the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a rare statement of alarm on Friday about deteriorating health conditions and inadequate preparations for aging prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The U.S. military must do a better job of providing care for prisoners who are “experiencing the symptoms of accelerated aging, worsened by the cumulative effects of their experiences and years spent in detention,” Patrick Hamilton, the head of the Red Cross delegation for the United States and Canada, said in the statement. In March, Mr. Hamilton and other delegates made a routine quarterly visit to the detention facility, the organization’s 146th since the wartime prison opened in January 2002. He said the detainees’ “physical and mental health needs are growing and becoming increasingly challenging.”“Consideration must be given to adapting the infrastructure for the detainees’ evolving needs and disabilities, as well as the rules that govern their daily lives,” said Mr. Hamilton, who had last visited the prison in 2003, when 660 men and boys were held there. Today, 30 detainees remain.
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