Saturday, April 19, 2014

9/11 Justice: FBI (Holder?) deliberately derailing GITMO Hearings?

The other day I wrote of the latest developments in the Military Commissions going on in GITMO ( GITMO defense drops a bombshell revelation)

Now, from the Guardian(UK) comes this:

9/11 families claim FBI spying on Guantánamo legal team 'sabotage'

Some victims' relatives speculate that FBI trying to sabotage commissions in order to bring 9/11 case back to federal court
Spencer Ackerman
16 April 2014

Eight relatives of the victims of the September 11 attacks expressed frustration with this week’s unexpected derailment of the 9/11 military tribunal on Wednesday, saying they suspected that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surreptitious inquiry into the defense teams amounted to sabotage.
“How can you not have a suspicion with all that we’ve gone through, just in the last two years?” said Bill McGinly III, whose son Mark Ryan McGinly died on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center, where he worked as a precious metals trader.

McGinly was among ten family members who arrived at Guantánamo last weekend expecting to see the commissions address whether Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 defendants, is sufficiently mentally competent to understand the proceedings, another in the litany of pretrial questions under consideration by the court ahead of the military trial proper.

Instead, McGinly and the other family members watched the commissions learn that the FBI secretly approached a classification specialist advising bin al-Shibh’s lawyers to get him to become an informant, apparently because of an investigation into the media leak of an unclassified manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. 

The defense teams argue that a government investigation into their own conduct creates a potential conflict of interest, pitting their need to defend themselves against their responsibilities to defend their clients. On Tuesday morning, after a session lasting less than two hours, the judge in the case, army colonel James Pohl, ordered the defense teams to internally examine the extent of their penetration and to provide him with a witness list....

MUCH more here.

Anybody who has been paying attention will remember how Eric Holder and his DoJ (encouraged by the Cheerleader-in-Chief) have long maintained that KSM et al should be tried in the US courts. Despite their many attempts, to hear the administration whiners tell it, we should 'blame' an unco-operative Congress that GITMO is still open. You will recall that MIC made a campaign promise (both campaigns) that he is committed to shutting down Camp GITMO. 

In light of that, it is hard to argue with Bill McGinley when he says “How can you not have a suspicion with all that we’ve gone through, just in the last two years?”

 Indeed.  Pay attention.

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