GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — For hearings within the destroyer Cole bombing case this month, the Guantánamo warfare court docket was largely empty. Skeletal groups for the prosecution and the protection sat within the cavernous chamber, silently watching an 80-inch display screen over the witness stand.
On it legal professionals argued and witnesses testified from a secret courtroom 1,300 miles to the north exterior Washington.
A former C.I.A. interrogator confirmed the navy choose how he confined the Saudi prisoner within the case in a field at a “black site” in Thailand. A former F.B.I. agent testified about gathering up the stays of the 17 sailors who had been killed in Al Qaeda’s bombing of the Navy warship off Yemen in 2000. A forensic psychiatrist disputed the lasting results of torture.
The choose and the defendant watched on reside video.
After the Sept. 11 assaults, the George W. Bush administration created a warfare crimes court docket at Guantánamo to be out of attain of the U.S. courts. But now, more and more, legal professionals are inspecting witnesses and making arguments within the distant annex — 4 miles from the Supreme Court and 10 miles from C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
The annex was arrange throughout the coronavirus pandemic when the Navy base commander positioned all authorized workers members beneath 14-day quarantine upon arrival at Guantánamo Bay. Each individual certain for court docket was confined to a cramped metallic trailer, with troopers and safety cameras monitoring all actions.
The distant chamber grew to become a necessity. Witnesses reluctant to journey to Cuba can’t be compelled to take action, however they are often subpoenaed to the annex, in Crystal City, Va. Someone can testify and go house the identical day quite than spend per week on the base between air shuttles.
Having most workers members and witnesses take part remotely, as occurred throughout the hearings this month, additionally eases the stress the court docket places on the bottom of 6,000 residents. Guantánamo, behind a Cuban minefield, depends on the United States for its providers — from communications by way of a fiber-optic cable from Florida to well being care, meals, gasoline, family items, even leisure.
But some legal professionals fear that distant testimony and presentation of proof grow to be too sterile. Nuances are misplaced, they are saying, depriving a prisoner of a proper to meaningfully confront an accuser — a query the U.S. Supreme Court is being requested to take up in an attraction of a financial institution fraud conviction that featured testimony by videoconference throughout the pandemic.
At Guantánamo, the trial within the Cole case has but to start. The choose is listening to from witnesses as he weighs what rumour proof can be utilized towards the defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who’s accused of plotting the bombing of the warship in Oct. 12, 2000.
Some legal professionals additionally argue {that a} Guantánamo trial counting on video-stream testimony from the United States undermines one purpose the Bush administration arrange the court docket on the base within the first place: to maintain it out of attain of the Constitution.
Because the hybrid federal-military court docket shouldn’t be on sovereign U.S. soil, one untested idea goes, international prisoners tried there are usually not entitled to the identical protections as legal defendants within the United States — even in a loss of life penalty trial akin to Mr. Nashiri’s.
The Guantánamo court docket was established to strive international prisoners who had been captured world wide within the warfare towards Al Qaeda. Intelligence gathering was a precedence; trials had been nearly an afterthought. Prosecutors on the navy tribunals depend on uncommon proof, together with abroad interrogations of prisoners who had earlier been tortured or subjected to different merciless and degrading therapy.
“Having part of the proceedings take place in the U.S. might undermine the government’s claim that the proceedings are outside the scope of the Constitution because they are taking place in a foreign country,” stated David Glazier, a legislation professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who spent 20 years within the Navy earlier than turning into a lawyer.
He additionally questioned whether or not distant testimony does a disservice to the finder of reality, on this occasion the choose and later a jury of navy officers. “It seems to me that the panel needs to be able to assess the credibility of the witnesses for themselves,” he stated. “It definitely is a lot harder to do that over video than in person.”
Michel Paradis, who for years has dealt with civilian court docket appeals of Guantánamo Bay circumstances, stated using the courtroom annex “puts the lie to something that already was a legal fiction” — that as a result of the U.S. navy court docket is in an American-controlled nook of Cuba, “the Constitution imposes no meaningful restraint because the proceedings are conducted on foreign soil.”
A former chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, lengthy argued that navy fee trials could possibly be held within the United States if Congress would permit the switch of prisoners at Guantánamo to U.S. soil.
Either approach, reside testimony has been more and more shifting from Guantánamo to the satellite tv for pc chamber, a categorized, eavesdropping-proof convention room that was retrofitted for $2.5 million to reflect the courtroom itself, minus a jury field and a choose’s bench. It has tables for 5 separate protection groups for the 5 prisoners charged as conspirators within the hijackings that killed almost 3,000 folks on Sept. 11, 2001.
That trial has not began both; after years in pretrial hearings, plea negotiations are underway.
The annex is off limits to members of the general public, who can watch from a convention heart on the Pentagon, a room on the Fort Meade navy base in Maryland or in individual in the event that they attain Guantánamo.
In May 2021, the chief prosecutor promised “an array of technological equipment allowing for near seamless integration of remote participation.” Legal groups would “virtually participate in all aspects of commissions proceedings,” he wrote in a pleading.
On the third day of the testimony of John Bruce Jessen, a psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the C.I.A., digital participation went like this:
People within the Guantánamo chamber watched on a display screen whereas protection legal professionals arrange a 30-inch-tall plywood field earlier than a digicam within the distant courtroom. Dr. Jessen confirmed how he used it on the Cole case defendant. Mr. Nashiri’s function was performed by certainly one of his legal professionals, Annie Morgan.
“Annie, you’re not being helpful,” Dr. Jessen stated. “We’re going to give you time to think about this. Get in the box.”
Ms. Morgan sat on the ground, slid contained in the field, ducked her head and wrapped her arms round her knees. Someone enjoying a guard shut the door.
The choose and observers at Guantánamo might watch in actual time, on the display screen displaying the crowded Virginia chamber, that demonstration and one other exhibiting how interrogators grabbed and slapped Mr. Nashiri in 2002.
But on a minimum of six different events, a safety officer triggered a mute button throughout Dr. Jessen’s testimony, to forestall observers from listening to something that could be categorized.
Source: www.nytimes.com