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    Military Judge Postpones Guilty Plea Proceedings in Sept. 11 Case

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    The judge asked defense and prosecution lawyers to settle on a date for the accused mastermind of the terrorist attacks to plead guilty.A military judge on Sunday postponed a hearing to receive the guilty plea of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, so that prosecutors can seek again to nullify the plea deal.Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, did not freeze preparations for the hearing, as prosecutors had requested. Instead, he told defense and prosecution lawyers to agree on a week or more next month or in early January to hold plea hearings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.The judge said it was “not reasonable to indefinitely delay” the entry of pleas in the case. He also told the sides to continue to collaborate on providing answers to questions related to clauses in the plea agreements. All three plea deals were reached July 31 and ostensibly withdrawn by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III two days later. On Wednesday, however, the judge ruled that Mr. Austin had acted too late and that the pleas were still valid, lawful contracts.Colonel McCall made no mention of the fact that his next scheduled hearing, from Jan. 20 to Jan. 31, straddled the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump — and most likely Mr. Austin’s departure from the Pentagon.But a defense lawyer noted that the official who had approved the deal — an Austin appointee — was likely to leave the Pentagon at the end of the Biden administration and could potentially become unavailable for questions related to aspects of the plea deals.In a rare Sunday hearing, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the lead prosecutor, told the judge that the chief prosecutor for military commissions, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, had instructed his staff on Friday night to prepare an appeal of the judge’s decision reinstating the guilty pleas. Mr. Trivett asked the judge to halt all plea-related proceedings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qaeda Commander at Guantánamo Bay Is Sentenced for War Crimes

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      A U.S. military jury decided on a 30-year prison term. But under a plea deal, the prisoner’s sentence will end in 2032.A U.S. military jury on Thursday ordered a former Qaeda commander to a serve a 30-year prison sentence for war crimes carried out by his insurgent forces in wartime Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The military judge excused the panel from the chamber and then announced that, under a plea agreement, the prisoner’s sentence would end in eight years.The outcome was part of the arcane system called military commissions, which allows prisoners to reach plea deals with a senior official at the Pentagon who oversees the war court but requires the formality of a jury sentencing hearing anyway.In handing down the maximum sentence, the jury of 11 officers rejected arguments by defense lawyers for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi that he deserved leniency, if not clemency, for his early humiliations in C.I.A. custody, subsequent cooperation with U.S. investigators and failing health.Mr. Hadi, 63, was aware of the deal that reduced his sentence to 10 years, starting with his guilty plea in June 2022. It was unclear whether victims of attacks by Mr. Hadi’s forces and their family members had been told. None of the five people who testified last week about their loss commented as they streamed out of the spectators’ gallery on Thursday morning following an at-times emotional two-week sentencing trial.The prisoner also did not appear to react when the jury foreman, a Marine colonel, announced the harshest of possible sentences. Mr. Hadi, who is disabled by a paralyzing spine disease and a series of surgeries at Guantánamo, sat in court in a padded therapeutic chair, listening through a headset providing Arabic translation.His case was an unusual one at the court, which was created to prosecute terrorism cases as war crimes after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While prosecutors cast Mr. Hadi as a member of the Qaeda inner circle before those attacks, there was no suggestion in his plea agreement that he knew about the plot beforehand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Battlefield Commander’s Case Goes to Guantánamo Jury

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      The panel is deciding a sentence for a prisoner who pleaded guilty to commanding Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan that carried out war crimes.A military jury on Wednesday began deliberating a sentence for an admitted war criminal at Guantánamo Bay after prosecution and defense lawyers portrayed the prisoner as, alternately, a senior member of a global Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from the U.S. invasion.Many of the U.S. officers serving on the 11-member panel are themselves veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How they view the crimes of the man called Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi could influence the length of his sentence, and whether they heed his lawyer’s request to recommend clemency.The closing arguments focused on the battlefield in wartime Afghanistan, in contrast to the court’s better known cases, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, which are portrayed as acts of terrorism.Mr. Hadi, 63, who was captured in 2006, pleaded guilty in 2022. Under the terms of his agreement, he is to receive a sentence in the 25- to 30-year range. But he could be released to the custody of a trusted country, if one can be found that will give him specialized care for a paralyzing spine disease that has left him disabled.Douglas J. Short, the lead prosecutor, called Mr. Hadi a “senior member of one of the most notorious conspiracies to date, Al Qaeda,” who joined the movement before the Sept. 11 attacks and did not give up the fight when the United States invaded. Mr. Short said that Mr. Hadi put civilians in harm’s way in a campaign of suicide bombings and other operations in the early 2000s in Afghanistan, when the United States was pursuing a “hearts and minds” strategy.He offered a timeline of the deaths of 17 U.S. and foreign coalition soldiers in 2003 and 2004. They were war crimes, he said, because the Taliban and Qaeda forces who carried them out blended in with the civilian population and used unorthodox methods of warfare, such as turning civilian taxis into bombs by packing them with explosives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      War Crimes Hearing Gives Public Virtual Look Inside a Secret C.I.A. Prison

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      Years after the agency’s “black site” program was shut down, details are slowly emerging during trials at Guantánamo Bay.The public on Monday got its first view of a C.I.A. “black site,” including a windowless, closet-size cell where a former Qaeda commander was held during what he described as the most humiliating experience of his time in U.S. custody.The former commander, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, led the 360-degree virtual tour of the site, Quiet Room 4, during a sentencing hearing at Guantánamo Bay that began last week. He described being blindfolded, stripped, forcibly shaved and photographed naked on two occasions after his capture in 2006.He never saw the sun, nor heard the voices of his guards, who were dressed entirely in black, including their masks.Mr. Hadi, 63, was one of the last prisoners to be held in the overseas black site network where the George W. Bush administration held and interrogated about 100 terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Even now, years after the Obama administration shut the program down, its secrets remain. But the details are slowly emerging at the national security trials of former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.In court on Monday, spectators saw Quiet Room 4, a 6-foot-square empty chamber, which Mr. Hadi said resembled the place he was held for three months — minus a bloodstain that was on the wall of his cell then.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Civilian Prosecutors Rejected Evidence in 9/11 Case That Military Calls Crucial

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      The revelation sets in stark relief the decision by military prosecutors to seek to include the evidence, which has opened the door to years of litigation over confessions by the men accused of plotting the attacks.For years, a thorny question has dominated pretrial hearings in the military commissions case over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Did the men accused of plotting them voluntarily confess in 2007 after the C.I.A. had stopped torturing them, and could those statements be used as evidence at their eventual death-penalty trial?So it came as a surprise when a veteran F.B.I. analyst revealed that in 2009, when the Obama administration was planning to instead try the men in civilian court, federal prosecutors had decided against trying to offer the statements as evidence.The revelation sets in stark relief the contrary decision by military prosecutors to build their case around summoning the F.B.I. interrogators as witnesses, calling such potential testimony their “most critical” evidence. It also underlines how that decision has opened the door to years of litigation and contributed to a lengthy delay in getting the case to trial.Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo from 2011 until his retirement in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.During a closed hearing on March 6, Kimberly Waltz, a supervisory intelligence analyst at the F.B.I. who works on the Guantánamo prosecution team, disclosed that civilian prosecutors had decided the statements were unnecessary. In 2009, when she helped the civilian prosecution team evaluate the evidence, federal prosecutors rejected using the confessions at trial, according to a transcript of the hearing recently released by the government.“At that time it was my understanding,” she said, that “we were not going to be able to use them; they weren’t admissible.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sept. 11 Trial Plea Negotiations Still Underway at Guantánamo Bay

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      The lead prosecutor briefed the judge on the talks in an effort to fend off a claim that members of Congress had unlawfully meddled in the negotiations.Prosecutors and defense lawyers are still negotiating toward a plea agreement for the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite the Biden administration’s refusal to endorse certain proposed conditions, the lead prosecutor said in court on Wednesday at Guantánamo Bay.“This is all whirling around us,” said Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the prosecutor, discussing key details of the negotiations in open court for the first time. He added that “around the edges we have agreed to do things” and that “the positions that we took at the time are still available.”In mostly secret negotiations in 2022 and 2023, prosecutors offered to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for detailed admissions by the accused architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other men who are charged as his accomplices in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. Since then, one of the five men has been ruled not mentally competent to stand trial.The occasion of the briefing was a legal filing by lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the defendants and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, asking the judge to dismiss the case or at least the possibility of a death penalty because of real or apparent political interference by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and other members of Congress last summer.In August 2023, those members of Congress began urging relatives of Sept. 11 victims on social media to pressure President Biden to derail any deal that would prevent capital punishment.At the time, the White House was deciding whether to endorse certain conditions sought through the talks, most related to addressing the physical and psychological damage the men had from torture in their early years of incommunicado custody by the C.I.A.On Sept. 6, 2023, the White House declined to get involved.Rita J. Radostitz, a lawyer for Mr. Baluchi, said that Mr. Cruz then took “a victory lap.”“The Biden administration was prepared to give them a plea deal,” Mr. Cruz posted on social media. He went on, using the acronym for the Defense Department, “After I pressed the DoD, they reversed course & rejected the plea deal. Big win for justice.”But both defense and prosecution lawyers told the judge on Wednesday that the White House position did not derail the talks.When Mr. Cruz got involved, defense lawyers were “working with the prosecution streamlining all the litigation to present, in an open setting, a full examination of the events of 9/11 and answer all the victim family members’ questions about what happened,” said Gary D. Sowards, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer.Any deal would take the death penalty off the table and require a mini-trial and airing of the facts of the attack, he said.The defendants want guarantees of trauma care for head injuries, gastrointestinal damage and mental illnesses blamed on their C.I.A. detention; to continue to eat and pray together communally, rather than be held in solitary confinement; and to get better communication with their families rather than recorded video calls. But Mr. Trivett said those demands, called “policy principles,” require infrastructure, funding and executive branch approval. So he forwarded them to the general counsel of the Defense Department while his team secretly negotiated how a plea agreement would play out in the Guantánamo court.He said Congress had legitimate interests in that aspect of the negotiations, because some assurances would require funding — and Congress decides the Pentagon’s budget.Mr. Sowards said a negotiated settlement at Guantánamo would not resemble one in federal court, where a defendant comes to plead guilty and is sentenced without a trial.These negotiations between prosecution and defense lawyers were working toward a lengthy, open court process that would involve a detailed plea, presentation of the crime, testimony by victims and possibly an opportunity for family members to have the defendants answer their questions, Mr. Sowards said.In military commissions, that process can last months.Mr. Trivett told the judge that about 20,000 people can be counted as relatives of the victims of the attacks, and there was no agreement “on what is justice in this case, what is an appropriate punishment.” He made the presentation on a rare week when only one relative was watching in the spectators’ gallery.“I’m glad to hear they’re still talking, and that there’s an openness to bringing a plausible resolution that will give some sort of finality to everyone involved,” said Colleen Kelly, whose brother Bill was killed at the World Trade Center.By “everyone,” she said, she meant the Sept. 11 families, the prosecution and the defense lawyers, some who have been shouldering this responsibility for two decades. Ms. Kelly, a founder of the Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows movement, came to Guantánamo on Saturday to watch a week of hearings as a court-approved “nongovernmental observer.”This is the third week of a five-week pretrial hearing session, and as it happened, the prosecutors sponsored no family members as guest observers.Last month, when family members were watching the proceedings, another prosecutor told the judge that, regardless of the outcome of their trial, Mr. Mohammed and the others could be held forever in a form of preventive detention.In disclosing the details of the continuing talks, Mr. Trivett said there had been no unlawful influence on his team. “Nobody has threatened me,” he said, adding that he was under no pressure “not to negotiate consistent with what we consider to be a just result.”On Wednesday, Darin Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Cruz, said the senator would continue his efforts.“During his time in the Senate, Senator Cruz has led efforts to combat terrorists, from the Iran-controlled Houthis to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to Hamas, in addition to advocating against plea deals for terrorists being charged for plotting and planning 9/11. He will continue to do so,” Mr. Miller said. More

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      Judge in Sept. 11 Case Visits Former C.I.A. Black Site

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      Col. Matthew McCall toured the part of the prison at Guantánamo Bay where, in 2007, federal agents obtained now-disputed confessions from terrorism suspects.In a first, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the security zone containing the wartime prison and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility at the center of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.It was a noteworthy moment in the arc of the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. No war court judge had before made the five-mile trip to look at the detention operations, where the military maintains the only known, still-intact remnant of the network of overseas prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.But Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, is edging toward a decision on whether the accused mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to conspiring in the attacks in their fourth year of detention, under questioning by F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo prison.And the prison site he visited, called Camp Echo, has played a central but covert role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the C.I.A. kept five prized prisoners there, near the prison facilities but out of reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of its secret overseas network that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in such far-flung sites as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.In April 2004, the agency closed the black site at Guantánamo and moved those five prisoners to other secret sites, on the advice of the Justice Department, to avoid a looming U.S. Supreme Court decision later that year that granted detainees at U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Bay access to lawyers.After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and 13 other C.I.A. prisoners be moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 to face trial, federal agents used the same portion of Camp Echo to obtain ostensibly lawful confessions by what the prosecutors called “clean teams.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S.S. Cole Case Judge Sets Goal of 2025 Trial

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      The NewsAn Army judge who was in law school at the time of the U.S.S. Cole bombing restarted hearings in the case on Monday and declared it was his intention to put the accused mastermind of the attack on trial at Guantánamo Bay in 2025. If he does, the trial would start a quarter century after the terrorist attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors off Aden, Yemen.“I think it’s important to set benchmarks,” said Col. Matthew S. Fitzgerald, adding that he expected to serve as a military judge through 2026. He replaced the third judge to preside in the case at Guantánamo, Lanny J. Acosta Jr., who held his last hearing in the case in June.The destroyer Cole, at port in Aden, Yemen, after it was heavily damaged in an attack in 2000.Dimitri Messinis/Associated PressWhy It Matters: Families are waitingIt has been a long wait for survivors of the attack and relatives of the sailors who were killed. A Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has been in U.S. custody since 2002 and was first charged in 2011, making his the longest-running capital case at Guantánamo Bay.Paul Abney, a senior sailor on the ship, called the judge’s announcement “delightful words to hear.” He was in court on Monday for the hearings and has traveled to Guantánamo about 10 times since 2012 to watch the legal wranglings.“Even if it doesn’t happen next year, the fact that he’s willing to put a target date down, and make it a goal to shoot for is, I think, inspiring,” said Mr. Abney, a retired Navy master chief.What’s Next: More hearingsColonel Fitzgerald has 14 more weeks of hearings on the 2024 calendar. Pretrial matters yet to be tackled include the admissibility of some evidence, proposed witnesses, whether Mr. Nashiri can be tried by a military commission, how to seat a panel of military officers and whether Mr. Nashiri would be entitled to administrative credit if he is convicted but not sentenced to death.Even before court began, the judge issued an order with deadlines for both sides to prepare for trial. The timetable orders lawyers for Mr. Nashiri to provide prosecutors with a list of witnesses they would want to call to testify at the trial by Jan. 9.Facts to Keep in Mind: An appeal loomsThe judge announced the goal in his first hour on the bench. But he made no mention of a government effort to get an appellate panel to overturn a decision by his predecessor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Life at Guantánamo Bay

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      Inside a new season of “Serial.”Around 780 people have been detained at the prison at Guantánamo Bay since it opened in January 2002. Thirty men remain there today, many of whom have not been charged.The podcast “Serial,” which debuted in 2014 with the story of a questionable murder conviction, has dedicated its new season to Guantánamo. Over nine episodes, it tells the story of the prison through a personal lens, by way of conversations with people who worked or were detained there.I spoke with the hosts, Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis, about the show. Desiree: There’s an interesting political story to be told about Guantánamo, but why did you decide to tell this story through the people who lived through it?Sarah: The government threw all of these normal people on Guantánamo, and they had to sort out how on earth are we supposed to behave in here, how are we supposed to make sense of this? So over the course of 20 years, you saw this thing, which was kind of like a terrible spasm in the national response to 9/11, harden into something that was trying to justify and sustain itself. I think that’s what we were interested in: Who were those people who are having to make decisions, who are having to survive a thing not of their own making, and what did that look like and what did that feel like?In the reporting of the podcast, did anything upend your preconceived notions or surprise you about Guantánamo?Dana: The people who work in Guantánamo for the military rotate in and out about every nine months, but the prisoners have been there, so very quickly the prisoners learned how the prison operated better than the guard force did. I heard a lot of stories about prisoners who would correct the guards and be like, “No, no, you need to give me 10 squares of toilet paper,” or “You’re not handcuffing me right. Let me show you how to do it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More