Judge threatens to suspend war court trial
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A military judge in the trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr threatened Thursday to suspend the terror trial unless the prison camp releases a detailed log of Khadr's treatment in more than five years of detention as an alleged al Qaeda terrorist.
Khadr, 21, is accused of throwing a hand grenade in a July 2002 firefight between U.S. forces and al Qaeda suspects in Afghanistan. A Special Forces medic, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., died of his wounds. Khadr was 15.
His attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, wants the log in a pretrial effort to limit the scope of evidence given to a jury of U.S. military officers at his upcoming trial, expected in late summer. He argues the circumstances of some interrogations would exclude some of his statements from the trial.
Thursday morning, the military judge, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III, agreed with the defense that it should get copies of the log entries from the prison camp's Detainee Information Management System, or DIMS.
Brownback is believed to be the first war court judge to threaten to ''abate'' the proceedings if the prison camp's command staff does not turn over the evidence.
''I find that this is relevant because it shows the day-by-day, hour-by-hour track of Mr. Khadr throughout his detention here at Guantánamo Bay,'' the colonel said.
The extensive document is "a method of determining how he went through the system.''
The hearing took place in the original military commissions courtroom, an old air traffic control tower on a hill overlooking "Camp Justice.''
A day earlier, war court staff retreated from the Pentagon's showcase $12 million ''Expeditionary Legal Complex'' following a series of technical glitches, including a power outage, in a first test use of a maximum-security, snoop-proof court created for the trial of six alleged 9/11 conspirators.
The long the Khadr defense team seeks would draw back a layer of secrecy surrounding Khadr's treatment at this offshore Navy base, where the Toronto-born teen grew into bushy-bearded, six-foot-two adulthood behind the razor wire of Camp Delta.
A statement Thursday evening from the prison camps command staff, called the Joint Task Force, or JTF, said the commanders were "working closely with the prosecutors to redact the records for release.''
Redaction is a process of censorship that blacks out information that the Pentagon or other government agencies don't think the public should see.
''This entails a significant effort to redact information which would put JTF personnel at risk,'' the statement added, without elaborating on the nature of the risk.
Defense lawyers argue that Khadr, the son of an alleged senior al Qaeda financier, has been subjected to repeated mistreatment at Guantánamo to reinforce a confession he gave in detention at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
They say he was coerced into a confession soon after his capture, injured with two bullet wounds in his back -- and punished here if he didn't stick to that first account.
Prison camp commanders have consistently denied that Khadr has been mistreated and say all enemy combatants are treated with safety and humanely.
Khadr was sent here in 2002 after his 16th birthday and has been held in the cellblocks with other adult prisoners classified as ''enemy combatants,'' -- not at Iguana House, a special prison camp set up for juvenile combatants since sent home.
Brownback noted that Khadr's defense attorneys -- Kuebler and Rebecca Snyder, a civilian Pentagon lawyer -- are cleared to see any sensitive national security information that might be included in the log.
He set a deadline of 5 p.m. May 22 for authorities to turn over the log or find a remedy for the standoff over access to the details of Khadr's confinement.
''If not,'' Brownback said, "we stop.''
After the hearing, Air Force Maj. Gail Crawford, a military commissions legal expert, said there has been no abatement so far at the war court, which is now receiving pretrial motions in six cases and has charge sheets for seven more in the wings.
''If you can't get discovery, you can't go forward,'' Crawford said.
Brownback's ultimate remedy after abatement, she said, would be to dismiss the charges entirely.
In early 2005, his attorneys sought a criminal investigation into allegations that guards used Khadr as a human mop to clean up an interrogation room at the prison camps.
According to their description, Khadr had been left shackled so long in an interrogation booth in March 2003 that he urinated on himself. To clean it up, they claimed, guards poured a cleaning solvent on his soiled prison camp uniform and dragged him across the floor to wipe it up.
In March, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said there ``was no evidence to substantiate these claims."
Different war court judges have been struggling with their authority to issues orders related to the running of the prison, a razor-wire-ringed series of camps that sprawl across a bluff overlooking the Caribbean -- several miles from the tribunal building.
The judge in the case of Osama bin Laden's driver, expected to be the first at trial, has set late May for a hearing on the conditions of confinement of the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan.
Hamdan's lawyers say he is so emotionally unstable after years of isolation in the camps that he is not competent to assist in his defense.
Last week the driver declared he would boycott the proceedings after the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, postponed a hearing on the topic.
''I don't have any control over the conditions of your confinement,'' Allred told Hamdan. "I've read in the newspapers that you and others are unhappy with them, and I understand that.''
Then Wednesday, a defense attorney in the case of Afghan detainee Mohammed Jawad, captured at 17, point blank asked Brownback whether he had the authority to intervene in the circumstances of his client's captivity. Brownback hedged a reply.
Jawad is accused of throwing a grenade into a U.S. military jeep at a bazaar in Kabul and injuring two American soldiers and their interpreter. He claims he was punished for refusing to come to his war court arraignment in March.
In order to get him there, his lawyer said, guards dragged him from his cell. In March, he was brought into the court in leg shackles, a war court first.
''I believe that some court should have some supervisory power over the administration of the detention facility. Up until now, it has been an empire unto itself,'' said Jawad's attorney, Air Force Reserves Maj. David J.R. Frakt, who is in civilian life a California law professor.
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