A guard tower and concertina wire are silhouetted against morning sun at Guantanamo Bay, June 20, 2007.Peter Tobia, Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT
WASHINGTON — The public should be allowed to hear the five alleged 9/11 conspirators describe what the CIA did to them in secret overseas prisons, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a motion filed at the Guantanamo war court late Wednesday.
“The eyes of the world are on this military commission,” the civil liberties group wrote in its motion. It was posted on the court website uncensored and included graphic references to water torture from a leaked International Red Cross report.
At issue is the court system that employs a 40-second delay of the proceedings, time enough to let an intelligence official hit a white-noise button if any of the men describe what CIA agents did to them after their capture in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003 and before their arrival at Guantanamo in September 2006.
The ACLU called the practice censorship, and said it was premised on “a chillingly Orwellian claim” that the accused “must be gagged lest he reveal his knowledge of what the government did to him.”
A court security officer used the white noise at an earlier, aborted effort in 2008 and 2009 to put the five men on trial for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
It was not immediately clear whether the war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, would rule on the motion before Saturday’s arraignment of alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo captives.
The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said Thursday morning that his organization’s National Security Project director, Hina Shamsi, was seeking to join a Pentagon flight to Guantanamo on Friday in an attempt to argue the point to Pohl — before the arraignments on Saturday.
The Pentagon had no immediate comment. “The judge will decide whether the merits of their complaint have standing,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale.
The ACLU lawyers also wrote that the 9/11 defendants obtained information about the CIA’s secret prison network and techniques only “by virtue of the government forcing it upon them.”
They wrote that the government already had declassified parts of an investigation by the CIA’s inspector general that concluded that agents subjected their captives to abusive treatment, and that it was in the public’s interest to hear the descriptions from the captives.
All five face a death penalty trial by military commission at Guantanamo as the alleged organizers, funders and trainers of the 19 hijackers who commandeered four passenger aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The brief included an affidavit from a scholar of military commissions who noted that past American tribunals were open, although held at remote locations that made it largely impossible for the public to see them.
Rather than presume information that comes from former CIA captives is classified, the ACLU lawyers wrote, the judge is obliged to review each statement beforehand and “make factual findings on the record before permitting any national-security-related closure.”
The argument echoes one made last month to Pohl by a First Amendment lawyer at Guantanamo in the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Aden, Yemen.
Ten U.S. news organizations sought to challenge plans to have Nashiri testify in a closed pretrial hearing about his treatment by the CIA during overseas interrogation.
The judge did not rule on the issue at the hearing because Nashiri was not called to testify.
___
©2012 The Miami Herald
Visit The Miami Herald at http://www.miamiherald.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, Manchester 
Spacecraft could one day navigate through the cosmos using a particular type of dead star as a kind of GPS.
Pulsars are a type of neutron starProduced in huge stellar explosionsRemnant core is highly magnetisedRadiation focused into intense beamsBeams sweep around as dead star spinsPulsars appear like ticks to observer Stability of ticks rivals atomic clocksEven for a probe at the reasonably short separation of Mars, the positioning uncertainty can be about 10km.
OMICS 