Thread by @carolrosenberg

Good morning from Camp Justice. The 9/11 hearing is closed this morning for a national security session. Lawyers will be questioning this FBI agent about classified things the public can't know.
nytimes.com/2019/09/19/us/…

Latest: Court reopens at 1245 with more unclassified questioning of FBI "clean-team" agent James Fitzgerald. No word yet whether ex-FBI agent Abigail Perkins will testify tomorrow or Monday.

Speaking of secret sessions... In DC today, US District Judge John D. Bates has called a closed hearing at 3 p.m. with lawyers from the Department of Justice and military commissions and a habeas counsel in the case of a Malaysian man who the CIA delivered to Gitmo in 2006.

His name is Mohammed Nazir bin Lep, and the war crimes prosecutor has proposed charging him. Background below. A notation on the federal court docket says the hearing is on the man's "motion for preliminary injunctive relief." The motion itself? Sealed.
nytimes.com/2019/04/10/us/…

Meantime, here at Guantanamo, the judge has reopened this 9/11 pretrial hearing session.

None of the defendants have come to court. So we hear from an anonymous Air Force captain that KSM waived his attendance at 10:05 a.m., and the others later.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Groharing is redirecting Agent Fitzgerald. The agent testifies that he questioned Ammar al Baluchi in the same tenor and tone as he has used in the war court to testify for these five days.
Aside: Mostly soft spoken.

Groharing asks the agent why he used the expression interview-interrogation to describe his four days with Ammar al Baluchi in Echo II in 2007.

He replies that interrogation has TV connotation and that his style was more like an interview, even though it was an interrogation.

Groharing asks the agent "do you have any recollection of using" any statements that came from the CIA in his interview-interrogation of Ammar al Baluchi.
(In 2007, after 3+ years in the black sites.)

Fitzgerald: "I do not have any recollection of using any statement."

Prosecutor Groharing asks the FBI agent if he believes any of the foreign documents he used in the 07 Gitmo interview-interrogation were bogus, tampered with.
He does not.

Groharing asks what entity would deal with a threat in the United States that is discovered by the CIA?
Fitzgerald: The FBI and local law enforcement.
Groharing: Is that one of the reasons the CIA would disseminate intelligence to the FBI?
Fitzgerald: Yes.

Judge Cohen is releasing Agent Fitzgerald with a caution to not discuss his testimony. "You may return to the continental United States or wherever your duties take you."
Prosecutors plan to call him back for Mustafa al Hawsawi's suppression hearing. Date unknown.

His is a brand-new habeas petition. I'd say it's hot off the presses but, because it's classified, we can't see it. Bin Lep was a CIA black site prisoner.

This afternoon we get the second witness in these on-again, off-again "clean team" suppression hearings: Former FBI Special Agent Abigail Lee Perkins of Virginia, a Department of Energy contractor.

And Baluchi lawyer James Connell called her. So he gets to ask questions first.

Ex-FBI Agent Perkins doesn't like the word "interrogate."
She uses "interview."
Connell asks if they can agree on the term "question."
And they do.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Perkins was an FBI agent in the New York office. "We all responded, ran down to the Trade Center," she said. She stayed on that case to July 2003, then returned to her earlier assignment investigating Al Qaeda's East Africa embassies bombing.

Earlier, Baluchi lawyer Connell asked her to confirm this was how she handled a foreign terror suspect in that case:
She did not read him a full Miranda warning in South Africa, because he was not in U.S. custody. She provided it in flight en route to the USA. (Not Gitmo.)

During her time on the PENTTBOMB* team she traveled to the United Arab Emirates "a handful of times." She was there in February 2002 and also...

*What they called the 9/11 investigation using acronyms for the Pentagon and Twin Towers.

on 9/11/2002, where she learned of the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh in Karachi, Pakistan. She and another former FBI agent, Adam Drucker, went there from the UAE, arriving the next day.

They went to the U.S. consulate and were taken to piles of evidence. They were looking at it for info of threats to the United States and -- after inadequate time -- told to stop. A representative of another agency whose name she cannot say in open court told them to leave.

During that trip she and Drucker didn't collect that evidence. They just saw it, understood that Pakistani authorities and "another government agency" were involved in its collection.
She got to see it later, after it had been boxed up and moved, maybe to Islamabad.

Perkins says that material included false IDs and the focus was "to make sure they did not come to the United States."

Now, Connell has a new topic: The capture of Mustafa al Hawsawi, the man she would interview-interrogate at Guantanamo for this case's prosecutors back in 2007.

She said she learned within hours, days that Hawsawi had been captured, along with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in March 2003.
Connell has her looking at a document in a SECRET binder of material we can't see but they can describe.
It's a request for information she made to the CIA.

This one sought info from Hawsawi and was routed to an interrogator "SG1."
She doesn't think she addressed them, just submitted to FBI for CIA "ever hopeful that it's going to go to the person who is in charge of getting information."
Her sense is it was "sort of ignored."

Here at the war court, defense lawyer Connell is walking ex-FBI agent Perkins through instances of questions she fed to the CIA black sites, and cables with responses came out.
One involves a seized little blue notebook.
Cables show Hawsawi and KSM answering her questions..

On how she came to be the lead agent to question Hawsawi as a clean team at Guantanamo and back up Fitzgerald on his interview-interrogation of Baluchi...

She was in DC already in 2006, when the CIA delivered the high-value detainees to Guantanamo, at the HVD prosecution team.

There was a computer server or somesuch with "buckets" containing evidence, documents, materials on each of the black site detainees at Guantanamo.
She agrees with Connell that those buckets, which sound like folders, probably contained CIA reporting.

In that prosecution team job, she could poke around the buckets of all 14 HVDs. Now Connell is referring to it as a closed network, not exactly a server.

But her focus was on four: Baluchi, Ghailani, Guleed and Hawsawi.
--Baluchi and Hawsawi are charged in the 9/11 case.
--Ghailani was sent to NYC, tried, convicted and in his federal prison.
--Guleed is a no-charge indefinite detainee.

Now Perkins is discussing how she would get to use an intelligence agency document.

It underwent an interagency analysis to decide "the equities," which apparently included downgrading classification. To get that process started, an agent would make a "Pester Request."

The different agencies would discuss national security concerns about it being used, essentially conduct an analysis of what could be compromised.
What material? "To the best of my recollection it would've been cables."

With that, defense lawyer Connell is done. She was called by Baluchi's lawyers because prosecutors didn't need her as a Baluchi interrogation witness.

So now prosecutor Jeffrey Groharing gets to cross examine her.

He asks her, theoretically, if she needed to interview a covert officer would she approach him in public.

She would not, she said.
She would discuss with her chain of command how to approach the OGA in consideration of their equities.

In response to a prosecution question of whether she's aware of foreign terrorist organizations targeting CIA officers, she provides this example:
nytimes.com/2009/12/31/wor…

Prosecutor Groharing asks her whether her Gitmo clean team interviews were "document based."
Yes, replies Perkins.

She said she relied on material that was swept up in the raids that seized Ramzi bin al Shibh and Mustafa al Hawsawi.

Documents she would chose would let her vet "the truthfulness of the conversation we are having."

Groharing asks if she considered CIA representatives who were part of the document conversations (pesters) part of the interview team?
Perkins: No.Their job was to ensure CIA information was properly protected.

Groharing: What about when you consulted with the NSA attorney?
The same, says Perkins. "Every document, everything that was shown to him, we had prior to his capture."
She describes them as sensitive site exploitation, all FBI holdings.

Groharing asks about the "atmospherics" when agent Fitzgerald was questioning Baluchi, and she was the agent's No. 2 and note taker at Camp Echo II in January 2007.

Perkins: Conversation. No confrontation. Rapport building. Open-ended questions. Cordial back and forth. Voluntary.
He understood, didn't complain about any ailment, wasn't anxious, nervous or hallucinating. "He seemed very relaxed."

Groharing: Why didn't you bring up his prior detention.
(Baluchi sent 3+ years in CIA black sites. He got to Guantanamo four months earlier.)
Perkins said they know that it "would've required permission from the CIA to use that sort of information."

Plus, as she saw it, there was a separation between the CIA and FBI that they were trying to draw. To raise what the CIA did to him would have "brought up bad associations or bad memories." And would not have helped the rapport based relationship.

On why it was voluntary:
They'd ask him often if he was willing to participate -- at the day's start, in the middle and whether day's end for the next day. He always said yes.
He said his English was fine, that he didn't need a translator. "Let's get down to business," he said.

She considered his information reliable, based on the documents they showed him and based on what they'd learned in the PENTTBOMB investigation.

Groharing: If you got to question him after his capture (in 2003 before his 3+ years in the the CIA black sites) would you have conducted the interview any differently?
Perkins: No.

With that, the prosecution is done and Connell declines to question her further -- in open session. The court is going to close for Perkins' classified testimony.

The plot thickens! I hear that Judge Bates has issued a Temporary Restraining Order halting something secret the public can’t know about. Temporarily. Because it’s presumptively classified.