9/11 plotters tell Guantanamo judge of legal woes
Facing the death penalty for their roles in the Sept. 11 attacks, self-described mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and an alleged accomplice told a judge Thursday that the military commission process was so dysfunctional that they could not file legal motions in their defense or have pretrial documents translated into their native languages.
In separate hearings, Mohammed and Walid bin Attash and their legal advisors ticked off one example after another of a pretrial system they say is barely operating. "We are not in normal situation. We are in hell," Mohammed told the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann.
Some of the defendants' claims were confirmed by government prosecutors, a Pentagon official and Kohlmann, who said he would look into them.
Last month, Kohlmann granted requests by Mohammed, a Pakistani, and Attash, a Yemeni, to act as their own lawyers in the case, in which they and three other men face a variety of charges in connection with the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. That means they are entitled to file legal motions and have access to much of the evidence -- like the Justice Department and military prosecutors seeking to convict them -- according to officials from the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, which is overseeing the controversial and unprecedented trials.
Kohlmann acknowledged to both men that he never received motions each of them had written in their detention cells, nor other communications the men wanted the judge to see.
Three letters from Mohammed to his backup legal counsel, written more than a month ago, also were not delivered, according to Mohammed and the three lawyers. Recent court filings and other communications by prosecutors and the judge himself either were never delivered to Mohammed and Attash or were sent in English, not Arabic.
Attash, accused of training some of the hijackers at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, said he received one important six-page filing by prosecutors that had been translated into Arabic -- but not until Thursday morning, nine days after it was filed, as he was walking into the high-security court for his hearing. "I was handcuffed, and I didn't read it," he added, prompting the judge to call a recess so that Attash could read it.
Kohlmann appeared taken aback by the assertions and promised to look into them if the two suspects filed court motions requesting that he do so. He said he would consider ordering a mass translation of potentially thousands of court documents.
