A military tribunal reconvenes on Tuesday for five men charged in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, but the defendants may sit this session out.
The judge presiding over the case has ruled, over the objections of prosecutors, that the defendants have the right to be absent from a weeklong pretrial hearing in a case considered to be one of the most significant terrorism cases in US history.
A lawyer for one of the five says he expects his client will not be there, while attorneys for the other men said they weren’t sure what would happen, and that the men would likely wait until the last-minute to decide as the judge has given them the leeway to do.
“They have the right to come to court or they have the right not to come to court, that’s what the judge decided,” James Connell, a lawyer for defendant Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said after Monday’s ruling.
The chief prosecutor, Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, had argued that the rules for the special war-time tribunals known as military commissions required the defendants to attend all sessions of the court at the US Navy base in Cuba.
But lawyers for the men disagreed, and said the threat that they could be forcibly removed from their cells would be psychologically damaging for men who had been brutalised while held during their captivity by the CIA in secret overseas prisons, prior to being taken to Guantanamo in September 2006.