The judge overseeing the premiere military tribunal at Guant\u00e1namo Bay effectively conspired with the prosecution to destroy evidence relevant to defending the accused architect of the 9\/11 attacks, according to a scathing court document.<\/span>
<\/span>Army Col James Pohl, who this week at Guant\u00e1namo is presiding over a resumption of pretrial hearings in the already troubled case, \u201cin concert with the prosecution, manipulated secret proceedings and the use of secret orders\u201d, the document alleges, preventing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed\u2019s defense team from learning Pohl had permitted the Obama administration to destroy the evidence.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWorst Constitutional Law Professor, Ever!<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>The accusation comes in a 10 May defense filing that the military commissions have recently unsealed. It contains significant detail about an episode that Mohammed\u2019s attorneys say has permanently tainted the most high-profile test of the US\u2019s post-9\/11 turn toward military justice for terrorism cases. <\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Mohammed\u2019s attorneys argue that the secret maneuvering left them unable to challenge the destruction of evidence. They contend that the case ought to be scrapped entirely. Their brief quotes a famous 1932 supreme court case, Powell v Alabama, to argue that failing to provide the defense access to evidence \u201cwould be little short of judicial murder\u201d.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cWhatever legitimate national security interests might purportedly justify the near-Star Chamber proceedings that have riven this case, there can be no articulable excuse for so clearly misleading Mr. Mohammed\u2019s counsel and preventing them from seeking remedies to prevent the destruction of crucial evidence,\u201d they continued.<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>But on 19 December 2013, Pohl ordered the US to \u201censure the preservation of any overseas detention facilities still within the control of the United States\u201d \u2013 a reference to the secret \u201cblack site\u201d prisons where the CIA and its allies tortured Mohammed and his co-defendants.<\/span>
<\/span>According to the defense filing, six months after Pohl issued an evidence-preservation order at the defense\u2019s behest and over the prosecution\u2019s objections, the judge \u201cauthorized the government to destroy the evidence in question\u201d. Pohl\u2019s reversal of course was \u201cthe result of secret communications between the government and Judge Pohl, which he conducted without the knowledge of defense counsel\u201d, the motion asserts.<\/span>
<\/span>That order, issued exclusively to the prosecution, carried with it a direction to provide the defense with a \u201credacted version\u201d. But Pohl \u201cdid not actually instruct the prosecution to proffer any proposed redactions of the order until 18 months after granting the government permission to destroy the evidence, and over a year after it was apparently actually destroyed\u201d, the defense team claims.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201c[B]elatedly,\u201d Mohammed\u2019s attorneys say, the commission gave them a version of Pohl\u2019s destruction order \u201cby attaching it to another secret order,\u201d and concluding, \u201cwithout benefit of ever having examined the actual evidence, that the government\u2019s proffer or a summary of a substitute for the original (now destroyed) evidence provided the defense with an adequate alternative to access to the evidence in question.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>Destroying the evidence in secret while permitting the defense to believe it had been preserved has \u201csubstantially gutted\u201d the credibility of the military commission and \u201cirreparably harmed\u201d Mohammed\u2019s ability to defend himself in a death-penalty case, the lawyers say. The episode \u201ccall[s] into question Judge Pohl\u2019s impartiality\u201d.<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham University Law School\u2019s Center on National Security, said the allegation of collusion to destroy evidence could prove to be a tipping point for the military tribunals more broadly.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cThis may well be the straw that breaks the camel\u2019s back in underscoring the unviability of the military commissions,\u201d Greenberg said.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cRemember, a main reason they couldn\u2019t have this [trial] in federal court was that it would have been such a circus. And now you have a full-blown circus, with judicial and every other kind of misstepping.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nGee, you think?<\/p>\n
This has been a complete clusterf%$#, and it has been since it’s begun.<\/p>\n
They wanted to create a system that would allow for no possibility of acquittal, and they wanted to be able to claim that it was fair.<\/p>\n
They got neither.<\/p>\n
BTW, Colonel Pohl should be removed from the case, and probably fired from the military, and if he has a civilian law license, he should be disbarred.<\/p>\n
This makes a mockery to the very idea of justice and due process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You would have to figure that if there were one case where the prosecutors at Guantanamo would have a conviction in the bag, it would be the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Well, it turns out that the prosecutors and the judge colluded to destroy evidence: The judge overseeing the premiere military tribunal at Guant\u00e1namo …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,972,1006],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-justice","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}