GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, CUBA
Hearings in the 9/11 death-penalty trial may be held in the Washington area for the first time since the case began, a move some lawyers say would bolster the argument that alleged terrorists are entitled to greater Constitutional protections at Guantánamo trials.
Across six years of pretrial hearings, the lawyers and judge have regularly taken a 1,300-mile flight to this remote base in southeast Cuba where alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged accomplices are among 40 war-on-terror prisoners.
On Sept. 17, the new trial judge ordered prosecutors to scout for a Top Secret site in the Washington D.C. area to hold closed sessions Nov. 7-9 “in the interest of judicial economy.” The judge, Marine Col. Keith Parrella, cast the stateside location as a solution to a scheduling conflict in Guantánamo’s only maximum-security court chamber.
But while the hearings will be closed and classified, some lawyers say, the shift to U.S. soil could strengthen the argument that the accused terrorists are entitled to constitutional rights like confidential attorney-client conversations, to confront one’s accuser, to not be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment, to attend all portions of their trial — some of which the Bush administration sought to deny those tried at the U.S. naval base in Cuba when it set up the war court in the first place.
