Thread by @carolrosenberg

Today is, likely, the final day of this three-week session of pretrial hearings in the 9/11 case. The way forward is on the docket, including a prosecution bid to conduct a mental health exam on defendant Ammar al Baluchi. #LearnedHelplessness

Court begins at 9 a.m.
I'm heading over, will catch you up later.

The hearing is in a lunch-time recess after a busy morning.

All five 9/11 defendants came to Camp Justice, including the often voluntary absent Mustafa al Hawsawi, who declined to come inside. It's currently the only place to meet defenese lawyers after a thunderstorm knocked out security cameras at the usual meeting space, Camp Echo II.

Defendant Ammar al Baluchi sat out lengthy arguments on a prosecution request for a court order. They want the judge to order him to undergo a government mental health exam to rebut a defense claim that he was compliant due to learned helplessness at this 2007 FBI interrogations.

Prosecutor Clay Trivett read at length from an earlier war court judge's decision that ordered such an exam for the former Gitmo prisoner Omar Khadr.
Trivett explained that this was fashioned as a discovery request rather than a request for a competency examination.

The prosecutor asked the judge to order the examination be conducted in the courtroom with guards watching remotely by camera and defense lawyers observing from the spectator's gallery.

Or, alternatively, he asked the judge to exclude an MRI taken at Guantanamo and other evidence defense lawyers got from a military doctor, which, they say, illustrate Baluchi has brain damage, cognitive issues as PTSD from the black sites.

Baluchi's defense lawyer James Connell said the government has no need for "additional mental health based interrogation" of his client. His team, he said, provided prosecutors with all the data obtained here by a U.S. military MRI machine, to provide their experts.

In addition, Connell offered a lengthy presentation of declassified CIA cables which, he argued, showed that, during Baluchi's years in the black sites, Baluchi was evaluated by mental health experts at least 16 times before his 2006 transfer to Guantanamo.

Connell said the documents identified at least four mental health experts from the black sites: Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who are due to testify next year, and two UFI mental health experts Y5X and F3K.

One mid-2003 cable the defense lawyer displayed for the court, the CIA reported: "Ammar is still developing a sense of learned helplessness which is contributing to his compliance..."

Connell read from another in mid 2003 that he said showed Baluchi had a "psychotic hallucination." In it, Baluchi is quoted as hearing another black site prisoner being beaten, raped and tortured to death. He also reported being put in his cell with a coffin holding a dead baby.

The 9/11 pretrial hearing is back in session after the lunch recess. Defense lawyers are arguing for new, later target dates in the judge's timetable toward a Jan. 11, 2021 start date. They haven't announced what date they think is practical for the start of jury selection.

They invoked the prosecutor's continuing efforts to meet their pretrial discovery deadlines, all these years later, the deteriorating conditions of working at Guantanamo, the complications of travel and the hardship being imposed on the legal teams.

KSM attorney Rita Radostitz blamed the U.S. government for taking the defendants to the black sites, not to court, and then choosing to bring them here and put them on trial in a new, "not regularly constituted court in Guantanamo."

Some of the 9/11 families who were watching at the back of the court were audibly upset by the argument.

Prosecutor Ed Ryan countered that what's going on at Gitmo now is not the choice of the U.S. government. He motioned to KSM and said he decided to invent a crime so horrible that it became an act of war in an illegal war.

That act, prosecutor Ryan said, forced the United States to create the black site program and make certain other decisions.

He urged the judge to keep his Jan. 11, 2021 trial date. "The prosecution will be here with our witnesses and our evidence."

He asked the judge to limit the defense lawyers' arguments. He suggested they are drawing out the pretrial process, ridiculed the notion that it might take two weeks for one witness to testify -- a reference to former CIA contract psychologist James Mitchell.

Prosecutor Ryan told the judge, Col. Shane Cohen, that the "best blast email" his boss, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, ever sent to the 9/11 victim community was this: Advising that Judge Cohen had set a schedule with a trial date.

"We do not want to backslide, sir," Ryan said.

KSM lawyer Rita Radostitz briefly responded to Prosecutor Ryan after lunch, reminding the judge that in the United States, defendants are afforded a presumption of innocence in every trial, including a capital trial.

Now lawyer James Harrington, representing 9/11 defendant Ramzi bin al Shibh, describes what he calls his client's ongoing after-effects of his black site torture: Noises and vibrations, itches and pins and needles he feels at Camp 7.

Background here:
miamiherald.com/news/nation-wo…

Harrington said Bin al Shibh experienced this in the black sites and now believes that someone in the prison, "not necessarily the guards," is doing it at Gitmo now.

Harrington invokes the sonic attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Havana and says the technology exists.

Harrington also invoked Connell's morning presentation of what happened to Baluchi in the black sites. For Bin al Shibh, Harrington says, working with the Camp 7 psychiatrist is "not an option" because he got his "baptism into his world of Western psychiatry" in the black sites.

Judge Cohen announces that the first trial judge's order to the Camp 7 prison to stop doing anything -- if they are doing anything -- still stands.

Prosecutor Trivett says there is no evidence of anyone in the U.S. government intentionally harassing Mr. Bin al Shibh in any way.

He urges the judge to not "spend precious time and resources re-litigating this issue just because somebody feels something different on his body.

The prosecutor tells Judge Cohen that Bin al Shibh is competent to stand trial but was at one point considered to have a delusional disorder.

Trivett reports: For a time U.S. military medical staff put Bin al Shibh on psychotropic drugs. But he suffered some side effects before they got him to a level that might work, so they stopped.
The prison would like to try another drug, Trivett says, but Bin al Shibh refuses.

Harrington counters that U.S. military medical staff at Gitmo cannot help because they are forbidden to ask even one question about what happened to him in his 4 years in the black sites. Never have.
To help Bin al Shibh, the lawyer says, an MD needs to know what was done to him.

Judge Cohen is wrapping up after some back and forth about how defense lawyers can meet with their clients because of damage to the prison compound attorney-client meeting site from the storms.

Prosecutor Bob Swann has pledged to provide a workable solution.

Meantime, the judge agrees to meet with some of the defense lawyers ex parte on a privileged matter at 5 p.m.

Aside from that, it appears that the three-week session is concluded.