Good afternoon from Camp Justice at Guantanamo Bay.
Good afternoon from Camp Justice at Guantanamo Bay. Agent James Fitzgerald is updating his testimony on what "clean team" interrogators did and did not know when they questioned the defendants back in 2007 to get now contested confessions in the 9/11 case.
Sept. 19, 2019
Good afternoon from Camp Justice at Guantanamo Bay. Agent James Fitzgerald is updating his testimony on what "clean team" interrogators did and did not know when they questioned the defendants back in 2007 to get now contested confessions in the 9/11 case.
This is part of the current judge's effort to wrap up certain testimony on whether the confessions could be used at a someday trial. Challenges include voluntariness after CIA torture and whether prosecutors' invocations of a national security privilege disadvantage the defense.
In court today we learned that prosecutors are conceding that the FBI had access to the fruits of the CIA's black site interrogations by the time of the 2007 interrogations at Gitmo. Agent Fitzgerald said the policy was not to cite earlier confessions in getting new ones.
A couple of interesting updates from the court: --Prosecutors are looking at whether the contract psychologists who waterboarded prisoners for the CIA can resume their pretrial testimony in February.
--Prosecutors also said, without proposing dates, that they plan to shore up their voluntariness argument with testimony from the psychiatrist Michael Welner, the terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann and an FBI analyst who is a member of their team, Kimberly Waltz.
--The judge said he expects the first 9/11 hearing of 2024 will test whether two hearings can be held in the same weeks. He described the possibility of sharing the current courtroom with the Hadi case judge and holding hearings on weekends and during unusual hours.
On the voluntariness question: At issue is whether FBI agents' accounts of their 2007 interrogations of the 9/11 defendants can be used at their someday trial. Prosecutors have decided to add witnesses after this decision in Gitmo's other capital case.
In court now... prosecutors just lifted their national security privilege invocation on the number of CIA lawyers who covertly watched FBI agents "clean team" interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo in 2007. Their new position is, it can be discussed. But only in secret session.
Cleared for you to see. Workers at Guantánamo Bay have now begun to festoon the base’s streets with holiday lights ahead of the Thanksgiving-Christmas season.
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