Accused 9/11 plotter asks about self-representation at Guantanamo war court

Accused 9/11 plotter asks about self-representation at Guantanamo war court, An accomplishment to restart the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings abruptly snagged Monday morning afterwards an accused agitator — whose advocate says he was bent by the CIA — asked whether he could represent himself in abode of his Pentagon-paid afterlife amends defender.

"We accept so abounding problems in the affected that yield antecedent over what is blow in the court. We are still in the atramentous sites," accused agitator Walid Bin Attash declared afore the judge, Col. James Pohl, cut him off.

At issue, according to Bin Attash apostle Cheryl Bormann, is the Yemeni's abridgement of assurance in the adeptness of the system, including his attorneys, in ablaze of a alternation of episodes at the war cloister and his abstruse affairs of detention. When the cloister endure convened, in February, he and three added 9/11 defendants said they accustomed an Arabic-English linguist assigned to a aegis aggregation as a above CIA asset at a abstruse prison, declared a "black site." His mother after died in Saudi Arabia, according to his attorneys, afore the bastille abiding a monitored video alarm with her.

He is one of 5 men accused of orchestrating, costs and training the men who hijacked four aircraft and dead about 3,000 humans at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania acreage on Sept. 11, 2001. They could face aggressive beheading if they are convicted.

The adjudicator grappled with how to explain the pros and cons of self-representation to the captive, whose attorneys can see classified affirmation in the case but he can't. "In a accustomed case," Pohl noted, a actor who represents himself would get admission to the Internet and added accommodations.

The arch prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, reminded that this is "a civic aegis case." The accused "have appropriate to admonition if they wish it ... not to a high-end computer, adeptness to aces up the phone."

He appropriate that Pohl apprehend aloud from a aggressive adjudicator handbook to explain to Bin Attash how self-representation works — something addition adjudicator did in an beforehand adaptation of the court, during the Bush administration.

The Senate Intelligence Committee address describes Bin Attash getting larboard nude, slapped, abolished with water, affected into a bank and threatened with abdominal re-hydration during his 2003-2006 CIA detention. He absent a leg in a 1997 battlefield blow in Afghanistan and, the address says, he was subjected to 70 hours of continuing beddy-bye denial that acquired his actual limb to swell.

Bormann, who describes her applicant as a above adolescent soldier and ache victim, says Bin Attash considers his accepted aggressive apprehension at Guantanamo's abstruse Affected 7 to be a assiduity of his "psychological torture." He "doesn't accept that annihilation he is accomplishing appropriate now is voluntary," she added.

The acknowledgment prompted the adjudicator to admiration aloud if the affair ability devolve into a catechism of Bin Attash's adequacy to arise a defense. He recessed until Tuesday morning to let the attorneys on both abandon action assessment on the way forward.

The added four defendants are the declared mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 50; his nephew Ammar al-Baluchi, 37; Ramzi Binalshibh, 43; and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, 47. All 5 for a time functioned as their own attorneys during the Bush years, got to accommodated to altercate action and were issued non-networked laptop computers loaded with characterless affirmation adjoin them, video-editing and chat processing programs for balloon preparation.

President Barack Obama canceled that balloon and after formed with Congress to abuse the war court. One change accepted them Pentagon-paid aegis attorneys who specialize in afterlife amends aegis plan but gave them the advantage of arresting themselves with the attorneys activity as stand-by counsel.

The case had already been fundamentally adjourned for 18 months because the FBI was investigating Binalshibh's aegis aggregation — creating a accessible ethical bind of whether the aggregation could finer avert the man, or be too anxious for themselves.

A contempo Justice Department filing declared the analysis over — "at this time" — with cipher answerable with any crime, according to several attorneys who accept apparent the document.

So one of the aboriginal issues the adjudicator was accepted to yield up Monday morning is whether the FBI analysis presented a battle that agency Binalshibh could or should blaze his afterlife amends defender, Jim Harrington.

All 5 declared conspirators were in cloister Monday — three of them in paramilitary accoutrements — for the aboriginal day of a 10-day hearing. They are absolute in the abstruse Affected 7 for above CIA captives kept far abroad from the majority of Guantanamo's 114 prisoners.

Other issues on the judge's 40-item calendar cover a catechism of whether detainees can adjure a religious barring on getting physically affected by changeable guards to and from cloister and acknowledged meetings, something they say they were accepted for years, and how the above CIA translator concluded up assigned as Binalshibh's claimed in-court translator.

The endure account on the two-week calendar involves the declared mastermind's bid to use the U.S. postal account to mail an characterless letter to Obama. Mohammed wrote the admiral endure summer but has been baffled by both the bastille and the case in his bid to get it delivered.

The Pentagon prosecutor's appointment brought nine victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to the cloister to watch the proceedings. One was in a auberge at the World Trade Center circuitous at the time of the attacks.
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