WALTER MICHOT MIAMI HERALD
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins includes the timetable in a July 31 unclassified court filing in response to a request by the judge to explain how the crude compound at Camp Justice with a single functioning courtroom could hold two national security trials or hearings at once. The USS Cole capital terror case is in pretrial proceedings as well.
The filing says it would take $4.5 million to $6 million to build a second smaller national security court — and there’s no government-wide agreement to spend the money on a single-defendant courtroom. Instead prosecutors propose a seven-day-a-week court with one trial or hearing held for four days, and another held on the other three days.
Judge Army Col. James Pohl bluntly told the prosecution earlier this year that he would not hold “night court,” essentially a second session in the courtroom run by a revolving staff of mostly national guard soldiers. It would burden the guard force and it “takes away from the seriousness of the case,” he said.
Pohl has previously declined to accept other proposed prosecution start dates, including to hold jury selection in September 2014, March 2018 and June 2018. At one point, Martins said the trial could start in January 2015, then for a time stopped offering predictions.
Curiously, the 11-page prosecution unclassified filing — which took 23 days for intelligence agencies to clear for the public to see — also suggests that, were defense attorneys not to invoke Top Secret information at the death-penalty trial, the Pentagon would not need a Top Secret courthouse for the trial of alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-accused.
Each 9/11 hearing in both the Bush and Obama administrations was shown to the public on a 40-second delay, including argument in unclassified government pleadings. Defense lawyers, who like the prosecution have Top Secret clearances to work on the case, have made clear they still want more evidence to argue both that any admissions made by the defendants and other captives is tainted by tortured — and that, if they are convicted, the accused terrorists’ three- and four-year odyssey through the CIA’s secret prison network deprives the United States of the moral authority to execute them.
At various times some or all of the five were subjected to beatings, nudity, sleep deprivation, isolation, food manipulation, rectal abuse and confinement to a coffin-sized box or smaller, according to the so-called Senate Torture Report on the spy agency’s Bush administration era Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.