This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.WASHINGTON — The navy choose presiding within the Sept. 11 los
This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.
WASHINGTON — The navy choose presiding within the Sept. 11 loss of life penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has scheduled his retirement for later this 12 months, within the newest blow to efforts to start out the long-running trial in 2021.
The choose, Col. W. Shane Cohen, wrote in a one-page letter to the chief conflict court docket choose that he was ending his 21 years of Air Power service on July 1. Until one other choose is appointed sooner, he wrote, April 24 can be his final day presiding within the case towards Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 4 different males who’re accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults that killed 2,976 individuals in New York, Pennsylvania and on the Pentagon.
The looming departure of the choose, coupled with a present shutdown of authorized group entry to the US Navy base jail zone due to the coronavirus pandemic, forged a shadow on the prospects of assembly the goal begin date of Jan. 11, 2021. A brand new choose must be chosen, and she or he will want time to learn the greater than 33,150-page transcript of the case in addition to lots of of authorized filings, some nonetheless awaiting rulings.
Colonel Cohen’s choice to depart the case additionally comes as he has been listening to testimony — and has scheduled extra witnesses — in an ongoing set of hearings on the protection legal professionals’ requests to exclude from the trial the F.B.I. interrogations of the boys in 2007. The protection legal professionals say these interrogations are tainted by the torture the defendants endured throughout their three and 4 years in secret C.I.A. prisons.
Though two psychologists who waterboarded Mr. Mohammed and designed the company’s interrogation methods as contractors testified earlier this year, their testimony has not yet been completed.
In his letter, dated March 17, Colonel Cohen said he was acting in “the best interests of my family and was not impacted by any outside influence from any source.” In an open session of the war court on June 17, Colonel Cohen told a defense lawyer that he believed “a court of this magnitude” needed “some level of continuity” that would “allow this case to move forward and for some continuity in rulings by the military judge.”
Colonel Cohen, the third judge in the case, was the first to set a trial date and an aggressive hearing and trial schedule that would have required long stretches of time at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba. In recent hearings, he had begun to suggest that the trial itself could start later than January 2021 and increased his trial time estimate to 12 to 13 months from his initial nine-month prediction.
The judge’s decision comes at a time of uncertainty about trial preparation during the coronavirus pandemic. Guantánamo this week disclosed that a sailor there was the first of its 6,000 residents to test positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Terry Rockefeller, who lost her sister Laura in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, said she was “outraged and deeply concerned about the likelihood of further delay. Judge Cohen purported to be committed to seeing the 9/11 trial through to a conclusion.”
The prison over the weekend halted legal meetings for all 40 wartime prisoners there.
All of the legal team members are based in the United States. Under a new policy, instituted in response to the virus outbreak, lawyers who obtain “mission essential status” to take a Navy air shuttle to Guantánamo must remain in isolation for two weeks at housing near the airstrip before being allowed to cross Guantánamo Bay to the site of the prison.
As of Wednesday, no prisoner had the virus, according to S. Maria Lohmeyer, a Navy commander and a spokeswoman for detention operations.
She said the guards and other detention center staff had planned “for weeks” and rehearsed “for the possibility of Covid-19,” including “scenarios that would require isolation.” She did not provide specifics but said the prison leadership had “implemented a layered defense that includes prevention and precautionary measures.”