2023-09-22 13:34:18
The American military tribunal at Guantanamo decided on Thursday September 21 that one of the accused, suspected of having planned the September 11 attacks, could not be tried due to psychological disorders linked to the torture he suffered in detention, according to New York Times.
Colonel Matthew McCall, a military judge, estimated that his psychological aftereffects prevented the Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Chaiba from defending himself. Doctors at the US base at Guantanamo, located on the island of Cuba, diagnosed the 51-year-old man with post-traumatic stress disorder and psychotic features, as well as delusional disorder.
His lawyer said his client was tortured by the CIA and driven insane by what the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques”which include sleep deprivation, simulated drowning (waterboarding) and beatings.
Five accused
Ramzi ben al-Chaïba is accused of complicity in the attacks which left 2,976 people dead. He is accused of helping to organize a cell of “hijackers” in Hamburg, Germany, whose leader piloted one of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center.
He was scheduled to appear alongside four other defendants during pretrial proceedings in the September 11 attacks trial. Among them, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed, number 3 of Al-Qaeda, considered to be the mastermind of the attacks. A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, the fifty-year-old is said to have suggested the idea of crashing planes to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.
Captured in Pakistan in 2003, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed was then taken by the CIA to “black sites” in Afghanistan, then to Poland, to be interrogated there, under torture, before being sent in 2006 to Guantanamo. A year later, he admitted, during a closed-door hearing, responsibility for the September 11 attacks as well as the Al-Qaeda attacks in Bali and Kenya.
His accomplice Walid ben Attash is accused of having trained two of the terrorist pilots to take control of the planes. As for Ammar al-Baluchi and Moustapha al-Hawsawi, they are accused of having managed the money transfers to carry out the attacks.
Preliminary hearings
All of them have been detained for more than fifteen years at Guantanamo and suffered acts of torture from the CIA, from which they still bear the aftereffects, according to their lawyers.
Indicted in 2012 for “murder” et “terrorist acts”, they are still awaiting their judgment, which should not take place for several months. More than twenty-two years after the attacks, the trial which is being held before military courts has not yet concluded. The procedure is still at the stage of preliminary hearings.
The procedure indeed gives rise to numerous disputes between the prosecution and the defense. One of the delicate points is in particular the admissibility of the evidence against him. Several confessions were obtained through highly controversial intelligence interrogation techniques during the George W. Bush years and are considered inadmissible by the defense.
In addition, the procedures preceding the proper trial take time because the American government refuses to make public classified documents related to national security, although requested by the defense. While awaiting their trial, the prisoners are held indefinitely at Guantanamo.
#trial #organizers #attack