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View Full Version : Guantanamo defendant calls tribunals a con



renak
04-07-2006, 02:53 AM
http://today.reuters.com/News/Crises...ryId=N06359732

Guantanamo defendant calls tribunals a con
Thu 6 Apr 2006 2:51 PM ET
By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba, April 6 (Reuters) - An Ethiopian prisoner called his Guantanamo war crimes tribunal a con on Thursday and said that after four years of interrogations, the U.S. military had not even managed to learn the correct spelling of his name.

The defendant, a 27-year-old British resident, is identified in the charge documents as Binyam Muhammad but he said his surname is Mohammad. He is accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to commit war crimes, including plotting to set off a radioactive bomb, and would face life in prison if convicted.

There is no uniform system of transliteration of Arabic names into English, and so either Muhammad or Mohammad could be correct.

Mohammad, as he said he prefers to be called, has proclaimed his innocence and has stated in court documents that he made false confessions after being extrajudicially transferred to a Moroccan prison where he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels.

"This is four years of interrogation, highly intensive ... torture, and you still don't have the right name," he told the tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann. "The man you are looking for is not here."

The defendant compared Kohlmann to Adolf Hitler and prosecutors to vampire slayers. He calmly criticized the tribunals as "crap" that set a bad example for the world and poked fun at their formal name, commissions.

"This is not a commission. It's a con mission. It's a mission to con the world," he said.

Kohlmann let him speak at first, then ordered him to stop using profanity, put down a handwritten sign reading "conn-mission" and conduct himself politely.

The military charges say the defendant joined al Qaeda in 2001 and got weapons and explosives training at the group's camps and guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in 2002 and his lawyer said he was sent to a Moroccan prison via extraordinary rendition, the practice of secretly transferring terrorist suspects between countries, outside normal legal channels.

Mohammad was held in Morocco for 18 months and gave false confessions including that he plotted with al Qaeda and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, according to his civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

Padilla was held at a U.S. military brig for three years but was never charged in a radioactive plot. He has since been charged in a civilian court with being part of a cell that supported terrorists overseas.

Mohammad was sent from Morocco to a secret facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan and then brought to Guantanamo, his lawyer says. He is the first British resident to appear before the tribunals President George W. Bush created after the Sept. 11 attacks to try foreigners for terrorism. British citizens held at Guantanamo were all sent home.

Defendants at the tribunals wear civilian clothes provided by their lawyers. Mohammad's lawyers brought him a bright orange shirt and trousers, reminiscent of the infamous orange jumpsuits Guantanamo detainees wore during the early days of the prison camp. He also asked to wear shackles to court but the request was denied, his lawyer said.

Human rights groups and legal scholars have harshly criticized the U.S. decision to indefinitely hold foreign prisoners at Guantanamo without the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights afforded in U.S. courts.

The Bush administration has defended the detention and interrogation of detainees as critical to national security in the war against terrorism.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legitimacy of the tribunals by the end of June.

Mohammad is one of 10 Guantanamo detainees facing war crimes charges and one of four appearing at pretrial hearings this week. The camp holds about 490 prisoners.
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