[ad_1]
Separately, the judge declined to excuse an interpreter who had previously remarked that the U.S. government was “wasting so much money on these terrorists. They should have been killed a long time ago.” Instead, the judge cautioned the interpreters — who were working from a remote location — that he expected their translations to be “neutral, sanitized, surgical.”
Defense lawyers sought an order from the judge to require prosecutors to be more transparent and proposed a December trial date, essentially to force the government to turn over the evidence.
One explanation for the delay is that, at Guantánamo’s hybrid federal-military court, the Pentagon prosecutors work with U.S. intelligence agencies to decide what evidence must be withheld from the trial. Together they redact documents or fashion substitutions for actual evidence, and seek permission to use them instead.
A judge compares the revisions to the original evidence and, if he decides they are inadequate, returns them to prosecutors, to essentially do better. Colonel Kraehe said the government should present all evidence and substitutions for the judge’s review by Jan. 31.
But, he said, March 2025 was the earliest practical date to start trial. This is the last hearing under the current judge, Capt. Hayes C. Larsen of the Navy, and Colonel Kraehe said neither the prosecution nor a new judge would be ready any sooner.
Once defense lawyers receive all the evidence, the case goes into pretrial hearings, with the opportunity to call witnesses, seek missing evidence — and, most likely, argue that some evidence was tainted by the defendants’ C.I.A. captivity.
In 2003, a C.I.A. interrogator told Mr. Nurjaman that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you,” according to a study of the C.I.A. program that was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014.
[ad_2]
Source link
