GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba ? The arraignment of five men charged in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks opened Saturday morning with what appeared to be an immediate attempt by the defendants to disrupt the military commission proceeding, including a refusal to speak by the normally loquacious Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
At the start of the proceeding at the U.S. military detention center here, the man who boasts that he organized the attacks refused, along with four co-defendants, to speak to the military judge, Army Col. James Pohl, about whether they wanted to keep their military and civilian counsel or represent themselves.
One of the men?s American civilian attorneys, Cheryl Borman, who wore a black hijab in court, said the men were silent because they had been ?mistreated? by the guard force at the detention center. Mohammed?s civilian attorney, David Nevin, said the reason that his client, whose long beard was streaked with red henna, was not participating was because of the ?torture that was imposed on him.?
Borman also suggested that women on the prosecution team should dress appropriately because the defendants might ?commit a sin? if they looked at them as they are currently dressed.
Later, Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, broke the silence with an outburst in which he said that the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is running Guantanamo. ?The era of Gaddafi is over, but not in this camp,? he shouted at the judge. ?Maybe they are going to kill us.?
Pohl warned him that if he continued to speak out of turn, he would be removed from the courtroom. He then settled down.
After their capture, each of the men was held at secret CIA prisons overseas before they were transferred in September 2006 to Guantanamo Bay, where they are held at a small, high-security facility known as Camp 7. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in the first month after his capture in March 2003.
Just 25 minutes into the proceeding, the video and audio feed to the public was cut for one minute and replaced with white noise when an attorney for Walid bin Attash said something an in-court security officer deemed classified. The proceedings are broadcast with a 40-second delay, and journalists and other observers sit behind audio-proof glass.
Attash, a Yemeni, was initially brought into court in a restraint chair after he had refused to attend, but the restraints were removed when his military attorney said he would not disrupt the proceeding.
Binalshibh and Abd al-Aziz Ali, a Pakistani, also stood in the middle of the courtroom and began to pray. Ali, at another point, began to read a magazine.
Pohl said he would not allow Mohammed and the others to ?frustrate? the proceeding, and in the face of their silence, he said that they had, by default, accepted their lawyers. The judge also appeared frustrated by the repeated attempts by military defense counsel to discuss various issues, including the sequence of events at the proceeding and the quality of the translation heard by the defendants.
The arraignment is being beamed to six military sites in the eastern United States where families of 9/11 victims can watch. It is also being screened for the media and the public at Fort Meade in Maryland, and more than 50 foreign and American journalists traveled to Guantanamo Bay for the hearing, as did a number of advocates from human rights groups.
The case against the five men has had a convoluted and politically charged journey to this moment.
The George W. Bush administration first arraigned the defendants in June 2008, when Mohammed emerged from his long detention and proclaimed his desire for martyrdom. The Obama administration ended that case as part of its plan to transfer the 9/11 prosecution to New York, but that effort, like the broader attempt to close the military detention facility here, collapsed in the face of bipartisan opposition.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder reluctantly returned the case to the military last year.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=150ae7447be85c69dab7437e1aebcb89
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