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Military prosecutors want to speed up the hearing schedule and start the trial next autumn for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 plot, Khlalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his four alleged conspirators – all of whom will face the death penalty if they are convicted, Reuters reported. The four men were arraigned on terrorism, murder, and other charges in May 2012 – more than ten years after four commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,976 people. Since then, the Guantanamo court has scheduled weeklong pretrial hearings about every six weeks, mostly to hear challenges by the defense lawyers. However, some previous hearings were cancelled due to computer problems and tropical storms on the remote Caribbean base. There have also been pretrial hearings on whether military and intelligence agents were spying on supposedly confidential attorney-client discussions, an issue that is still unresolved. In another weeklong pretrial hearing to begin on Monday, Colonel James Pohl will hear the prosecution’s arguments for speeding up the proceedings. Prosecutors will push the judge to set firm deadlines for new filings, hold month-long hearings to work through a backlog of outstanding motions, and to start picking a jury for a trial to take place on September 22, 2014. The prosecution wrote in court filings that continuing at the current pace “will result in litigation that is unnecessarily prolonged and does not serve the interests of justice.” In the documents, the prosecution said they have already given the defense team most of their evidence, including 170,000 pages of unclassified information. They will hand over their secret evidence once all five defense teams have signed up to ‘memorandums of understanding’ to make sure the evidence is safeguarded as secret. Defense team up in arms James Connell, a defense attorney who has signed a memorandum of understanding, said that prosecutors have not handed over any evidence that will be most in contention, which relates to the years the defendants were held in CIA custody. So far, 80 percent of the evidence received by the defense teams relates to the destruction caused by the attacks themselves and business records relating to the hijackers – matters that are not in dispute. “The CIA and [Defense Department] have revealed far more information about what happened during that time to the makers of [Hollywood film] ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ than they’ve revealed to us,” Connell said. The CIA cooperated with the makers of the movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and has admitted that one character was based on Connell’s client Ammar al Baluchi – an alleged Al-Qaeda money mover who is the nephew alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In the film, CIA interrogators string up the character with a rope, waterboard him, and stuff him into a coffin-like box. The CIA has not acknowledged using those techniques on Baluchi, but has admitted using them on other prisoners. Defense lawyers insist that they cannot prepare adequately for trial unless they know what happened to the five men between their capture in 2002 and 2003, and their transfer to Guantanamo in 2006. Once they determine that information, they say it will take them a couple of years to investigate it, making sure it has not been tainted by torture. If it has, the information cannot be used in court.
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