Expenses in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo

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Expenses in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Translation and interpretation issues on Monday delayed by someday navy efforts to formally cost three Southeast Asian males


GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Translation and interpretation issues on Monday delayed by someday navy efforts to formally cost three Southeast Asian males — held by the USA for 18 years — with conspiring in lethal terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.

Prosecutors accuse the three prisoners — Encep Nurjaman, who is called Hambali; Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep; and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin — of homicide, terrorism and conspiracy within the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 individuals, and the 2003 Marriott resort bombing in Jakarta, which killed at the very least 11 individuals and wounded at the very least 80.

Protection attorneys have referred to as them torture victims who spent about three years within the secret C.I.A. jail community the place brokers used waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, painful shackling and different now outlawed “enhanced interrogation” methods to extract info from their captives.

In 2003, a C.I.A. interrogator instructed Mr. Hambali that he would by no means go to courtroom, as a result of “we are able to by no means let the world know what I’ve carried out to you,” in keeping with a examine of the C.I.A. program that was launched by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014.

Monday’s formal charging was meant to be a crossroads of kinds, the beginning of proceedings in a case that was accepted by a Trump administration appointee on Jan. 21, the primary full day of President Biden’s administration — and postponed by six months by pandemic restrictions.

The proceedings ended up being the most recent instance of the delays which have plagued Guantánamo’s justice system practically 20 years after it was chosen to carry detainees captured after the Sept. 11 assaults and within the world effort to trace down terrorists.

All three males have been within the custody of the USA since 2003, and have been held at Guantánamo as members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group. Mr. Hambali, who’s Indonesian, is accused of allying himself with Osama bin Laden’s world jihad, and sending Mr. Bin Amin and Mr. Bin Lep, former structure college students who met in faculty in Malaysia, to coach in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Translation and technical points had been evident on the outset. One lawyer identified {that a} prisoner had talked about “Google” in a comment in Malay for the decide, however the courtroom interpreter didn’t point out the search engine in an English translation. The Indonesian translator turned “authorized coaching” in English into “coaching authorized” in Bahasa Indonesian.

Protection attorneys mentioned with alarm that each one three defendants acknowledged a “Mr. Singh,” a translator with whom they every had confidential conversations as they ready to hunt launch via a evaluation board listening to, sitting beside the lead prosecutor in courtroom on Monday, now working for the prosecution.

Attorneys for the three prisoners additionally instructed the decide that the courtroom’s official Indonesian translator had in 2020 supplied the opinion that “the federal government is losing cash on these terrorists; they need to have been killed a very long time in the past,” and added that they’d a sworn affidavit from a witness who heard the comment. Prosecutors are looking for life sentences within the case.

Mr. Bin Lep’s lawyer, Brian Bouffard, declared the Indonesian American contract translator “irretrievably biased.” Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, Christine Funk, questioned why the prosecutors wanted an interpreter on the arraignment listening to within the first place: “Are they spying on us? I don’t know.”

The trial decide, Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen, tried to fix the issues. He gave the official courtroom translation group 10-minute breaks each 20 minutes. He instructed protection attorneys to file authorized motions in the event that they believed there have been interpretation issues that required cures. And he postponed till Tuesday the studying of the fees, which was the rationale for Monday’s listening to.

Protection attorneys, each civilian and navy, and all paid by the Pentagon, described the case as nonetheless in its infancy. Prosecutors, they mentioned, had offered maybe 2 p.c of the pretrial paperwork that may very well be used within the case, together with accounts of interrogations the F.B.I. did in 2007 with the prisoners quickly after their switch to navy custody from the C.I.A. Prosecutors declined to remark.

Mr. Hambali’s lawyer, James R. Hodes, referred to as the case “absurd,” partly due to the size of his consumer’s detention and the practically two-decade delay in bringing prices in opposition to him. He instructed reporters earlier than the listening to that Mr. Hambali had been “brutalized” and spent at the very least half of his detention in solitary confinement. He mentioned the prisoner was owed “an apology” and repatriation, “to not be held in a cage in a Caribbean island.”

Hearings at Guantánamo have been largely held between English and Arabic, however have additionally suffered translation issues. In 2015, one of many males accused of plotting the Sept. 11 assaults blurted out the title of a translator in courtroom — and disclosed that the linguist had beforehand labored for the C.I.A. at a black web site, exposing his id and derailing per week of hearings.

Discovering U.S. translators with top-secret safety clearances who communicate Southeast Asian languages has apparently proved much more of a problem. The Senate examine of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program cited a January 2004 cable from a secret detention web site that reported that Mr. Bin Lep’s “English could be very poor, and we should not have a Malay linguist.”



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