US military assigns Army colonel to judge trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
Timing of move questioned as President-elect Barack Obama restates his vow to close Guantánamo prison camps

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008...sheik-mohammed

Wednesday November 19 2008

The US military has assigned an Army colonel to take over the coming war crimes trial of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a sign that the Pentagon is plunging ahead with plans for military commissions of alleged 9/11 co-conspirators.

Army Col Stephen R Henley replaces Marine Col Ralph Kohlmann, who at an earlier 9/11 hearing revealed he was retiring from active-duty service in April. He will join a legal clinic at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as a civil servant.

Henley has been a military judge for 10 years and has a law degree from George Washington University. As an Army judge, he presided at the courts martial of Maryland soldiers accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. As a commissions judge, he is the only officer so far to exclude a confession on grounds it was derived from torture.

The American Civil Liberties Union derided the timing of the assignment: a day after President-elect Barack Obama restated his vow to close Guantánamo prison camps in a post-election interview on CBS' 60 Minutes.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero called the timing "highly suspect and disturbing" and a bid "to sabotage President-elect Obama's plans by ramming through these cases while the new administration is making plans to dismantle the military commission system".

War court spokesman Joe DellaVedova said there was nothing sinister about the timing or the selection of Henley by Kohlmann to replace him.

"Retirements happen all the time in the military," said DellaVedova, a civilian who had been an Air Force public affairs major. He called the announcement, three weeks before the next 9/11 hearing at Guantánamo, "an effort to establish some continuity for the accused".

At issue is what, if anything, a future Obama administration would use in place of military commissions, the special post-9/11 war court the Bush administration created to prosecute accused terrorists as war criminals.

Obama has said that he wants terror suspects tried in criminal courts or, in some instances, by traditional military courts martial.

The ACLU, which has mounted a defence fund for those accused in death penalty cases at Guantánamo, wants Obama to close the commissions by executive order on inauguration day and switch cases that should be prosecuted to traditional courts.

The ACLU's John Adams Project funds seasoned civilian criminal defence attorneys working with Pentagon lawyers assigned to the five 9/11 suspects for whom the prosecution proposes military execution.

Mohammed and four others allegedly financed, orchestrated and trained the September 11 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon.

The timing leaves Henley to decide some thorny pre-trial issues, among them what evidence might be heard about the treatment of the five men across years of secret CIA interrogation before their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006.

The spy agency has confirmed it used the waterboarding technique on Mohammed to extract al-Qaeda secrets.

Also, still hanging is what to do about the mental health status of alleged co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who is being prescribed psychotropic drugs at a secret Guantánamo detention called Camp 7.

In pretrial hearings, the two judges have displayed starkly different styles.

Kohlmann is a sharp-tongued Marine who at the commission chambers allowed the accused terrorists to deliver monologues but displayed little patience for attorneys.

On occasion, he has cut off an attorney's effort to argue a point with statements like: "Which part of no do you not understand?" or "Sit down".

Henley has shown more patience, particularly at the pre-trial hearings of a young Afghan, Mohammed Jawad, in which he engaged in legal discussions with military defence attorneys.

He also has excluded Jawad's Kabul confessions from his upcoming January trial. In a war court first, Henley ruled that an accused was tortured - notably through threats against his family - while he was interrogated at an Afghan police station into confessing that he threw a grenade in December 2002 which maimed two US soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.

Henley's first 9/11 hearing is scheduled for December 8, when the Pentagon has plans to bring down five family members of those killed on September 11 to watch the proceedings.