A military judge penalized US prosecutors on Tuesday by blocking their use of a May 2003 interrogation as they finished presenting evidence in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial.
Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, said the government could not use the statements made by Salim Hamdan in the interrogation at Guantanamo as a penalty for not providing his defense team with potentially important documents until after the trial had started.
Allred said he would reconsider the ruling yesterday, when the defense was scheduled to begin presenting its evidence in the first US war crimes trial since World War II.
But the judge said he would only allow prosecutors to submit the interrogation if they could provide “clear and convincing evidence” the statements were not obtained through coercion.
The judge already ruled that prosecutors cannot use a series of interrogations of Hamdan at the Bagram air base and Panshir, Afghanistan, that he determined were made under coercive conditions.
He said he would use a higher standard to evaluate the May 2003 interrogation to penalize the prosecution for breaking the court-imposed deadline.
The deputy chief defense counsel for the war crimes tribunals, Michael Berrigan, said the ruling was a welcome response to government’s “inexcusable” delay in providing the defense with records that provide new details about Hamdan’s more than six years of confinement at Guantanamo.
“It’s gratifying to get this ruling, but it doesn’t go far enough,” Berrigan said.
Defense lawyers have been sifting through the prison records for material to support Hamdan’s allegations that he was subjected to abuse, including sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. Such evidence could buttress their claims that he was coerced into making incriminating statements to authorities.
The May 2003 interrogation was conducted at this US Navy base by two al-Qaeda specialists, Ali Soufan of the FBI and Robert McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and has been described in court as the most complete summary of evidence against Hamdan.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS