Barack Obama storms the Guantánamo Bay torture chamber
The 'terrorism trial of the decade’ begins on Monday in Guantánamo Bay – so why is the US President-Elect planning to derail it? Tim Shipman reports from Washington
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...torms-the-Guantanamo-Bay-torture-chamber.html
12/6/2008
On Monday morning, a heavy-set man in thick spectacles will be led from a concrete cell, whose narrow-slit window overlooks the Caribbean, by soldiers whose name tags have been removed from their uniforms and replaced with a Velcro strip reading: “I don’t know”.
He will be taken to a maximum-security courtroom to sit with four co-defendants 30 ft from a glass wall — all that will separate him from 10 families who lost loved ones in the terrorist atrocities for which he has claimed credit.
The moment marks the start of five days of trial hearings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-styled architect of the September 11 attacks and one-time number three in the al-Qaeda hierarchy. The guards at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, scene of the military tribunal, will be anonymous, to prevent reprisal attacks on their families.
The KSM trial — as its primary defendant is known in security circles — ought to be a moment of catharsis for America. It will be pregnant with meaning for the Bush administration, which will have just 43 days left in power; for President-Elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the detention camp; and for Alice Hoagland, who will sit behind the glass screen looking at the man responsible for the death of her son, Mark Bingham. He died on United Airlines Flight 93, which plunged into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers tried to take back the hijacked aircraft.
But what is being dubbed “the terrorism trial of the decade” could be in vain if Mr Obama tears up the laws under which it is being conducted.
The US Supreme Court ruled in June that the detainees have a right to go before federal judges, but officials in the Bush administration pushed to have Guantánamo’s most notorious captives tried before the President leaves the White House next month.
Lt-Col Darrel Vandeveld, a former Guantánamo prosecutor who resigned over what he calls a culture of secrecy and mismanagement at the base, said: “It’s clear that civilians running the commissions wanted to charge the 9/11 defendants to meet an arbitrary deadline.They wanted to rush what they viewed as the 'worst of the worst’ through the system, regardless of the evidence or whether it had been obtained by waterboarding or other forms of torture.”
KSM is one of three detainees the CIA admits to waterboarding, an “enhanced interrogation” technique that simulates drowning.
Clive Stafford Smith, the lawyer representing the former British resident Binyam Mohamed, awaiting trial in Guantánamo, is dismissive of the KSM trial: “This is just a PR exercise. Nothing will come of it. It will all be shut down before the trial is completed.” Everything said in the courtroom will be broadcast to the watching press and families on a 20-second delay, so that classified material on their treatment can be muted.
The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that, in conversations with Western diplomats, Mr Obama’s senior aides have made clear that he will announce the closure of the Guantánamo Bay facility and an end to torture as soon as he is sworn in, perhaps in his inauguration speech. He is also planning a speech in a Muslim city, probably Cairo, during his first 100 days to help repair relations with the Islamic world.
Lt-Col Vandeveld said: “We should end the shame of Guantánamo now, close it down. The handful of bona fide terrorists, who have been held at Guantánamo for as long as seven years, should be tried in a civilian court.”
But the status of the 242 remaining Guantánamo detainees is such that it could take months to arrange for secure detention facilities in the US and to return other prisoners to their countries of origin, most of whom do not want them back.
One Washington diplomat said: “Obama will start things off pretty fast. We’re expecting a very early announcement. There will be a road map to closure and there will be some proper process of law. But it won’t shut down immediately. We recognise that there are real security threats with some of those left.”
The remaining detainees include 14 high-value captives, plus members of the so-called Dirty Thirty, who include bodyguards of Osama bin Laden caught fleeing to Pakistan in 2001.
A study by the Weekly Standard magazine of those still held found that of the 242 prisoners, 174 either ran or attended terrorist training camps, 146 have either operated or stayed in an al-Qaeda or Taliban guesthouse, 116 have links to jihadist recruiting networks, and 112 participated in hostilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
KSM’s co-defendants include Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who are all accused of aiding and training the hijackers. Each is charged with 2,973 counts of murder, one for each person killed on September 11.
KSM is the most hated “important” terrorist in US custody. The 9/11 Commission report labelled him the “principal architect of the attacks”. Without him, there might well have been no 9/11 or “war on terror”.
Born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents, he moved to the US as a teenager and earned a degree in mechanical engineering at a university in North Carolina. After fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he funded his nephew Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, as well as the abortive Operation Bojinka, a plot to explode a dozen airliners over the Pacific.
The CIA says he also confessed to beheading the journalist Daniel Pearl.Captured in Pakistan in 2003 and sent to Guantánamo in 2006, he has been fingered as the mastermind of the show-bomb plot that ensnared Briton Richard Reid and was indirectly implicated in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.
But for all that, KSM has subsequently retracted his confessions, claiming translators “put many words in my mouth” and accusing his captors of torture.
His trial is a test, in part, of whether torture can ever be an effective or ethical part of the armoury of a Western nation. Lt-Col Vandeveld is clear that it cannot. “Torture may result in reliable information — no question about that. But is torture reconcilable with our basic humanity or with America’s desire to be an example to the rest of the world? The answer is no. Torture, however you define it, is wrong, appalling, immoral.”
As someone who saw the system from the inside, he believes that the military tribunals have also been incompetently handled, something that might give pause to their more gung-ho supporters.
He calls the handling of the first military commission trial, earlier this year, which saw Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan jailed for just six months, after his five years of time already served, as “incompetent to the point of disbelief”.
“The supervisory prosecutor should have been summarily relieved of command, but I suspect that none of the military services could find anyone willing to replace him.”
Lt-Col Vandeveld says most military lawyers dragooned into serving at the base were “unmotivated, untrained and unsuitable”, deficiencies he believes “created a stain on American military honour and America’s standing in the world”.
But his most serious allegations are that key evidence has never been presented to prosecutors, let alone defence counsel for the detainees (who are in any case only allowed to see unclassified summaries of intelligence evidence gathered against their clients).
Lt-Col Vandeveld recalls one case. “I was handed a file that supposedly contained every document, every witness statement, every lab report. But when I started to go through the disk of information there were huge gaps. As a career prosecutor, I found that astonishing and disturbing.”
These claims have huge implications for Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian who moved to the UK in the 1990s and is now held in Guantánamo. He is accused of meeting senior al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he was allegedly tasked with attacking targets in the US. The British Government wants him to stand trial in the UK.
Mr Mohamed says that he was tortured in a secret “dark prison” in Afghanistan and his genitals attacked with razor blades after he was interrogated in Morocco.
A US judge has ruled that Defence Secretary Robert Gates must sign an affidavit by Thursday swearing that no exculpatory evidence has been withheld from his defence team.
Mr Stafford Smith, Mr Mohammed’s lawyer, said: “The material they’ve shown doesn’t breathe one word about where Binyam was for two years.” He believes Mr Gates is vulnerable to a charge of perjury if he signs such a document.
In a letter to Mr Gates, seen by the The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Stafford Smith writes: “The government has at no point in this case even acknowledged that Mr Mohamed was rendered by the US to Morocco on July 21, 2002, or that he was held there for 18 months, or that he was abused there.
“It pains me to have to say that the government continues to ignore its own obligations, and is risking sanctions.”
This is the mess that Barack Obama is inheriting. By waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, US officials may have made it impossible to put him on trial in a civil court, but US intelligence officials insist that he also gave up vital information that helped them thwart future atrocities and save lives.
A former CIA officer close to the National Security Council said: “The Bush people have been spelling this out real clear for the transition team. They’re saying: 'You want to close Gitmo [Guantánamo], fine, but make damn sure you know what you’re going to do with these people before you do.’ If you will only put them on trial after the fact, it’s harder to prevent attacks.”
Mr Obama’s team is divided between those who want a rigid adherence to the rule of law and those who believe the terrorist suspects who can be neither released or tried must have a third legal category of their own.
The choice he makes may determine whether his presidency, like that of George W. Bush, is dominated by the war that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed unleashed in 2001.
