A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has ruled one of the defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks unfit for trial after a military medical panel found that the man’s sustained abuse in CIA custody years earlier has rendered him lastingly psychotic.
US Colonel Matthew McCall said that the incompetency finding for Ramzi bin al-Shibh meant the prosecution of his four codefendants would continue without him. Al-Shibh remains in custody.
McCall issued his ruling late on Thursday. Pretrial hearings for the remaining defendants resumed on Friday in the military courtroom at the US naval base on Cuba. No trial date has been set for the case, which has been slowed by logistical problems, high turnover and legal challenges.
Photo: AP
A Yemeni, al-Shibh is accused of organizing one cell of the 19 hijackers who commandeered four commercial airplanes to carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people outright in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The attacks were the deadliest of their kind on US soil.
Brett Eagleson, whose father, Bruce Eagleson, was killed when one of the hijacked planes destroyed the south tower of the World Trade Center, called the events that forced the sidelining of al-Shibh’s prosecution “another example of the lack of justice that the 9/11 community has received at the hands of our own government.”
“They wrongfully tortured these individuals. We don’t stand for torture. Because of that we’re denied a trial. We’re denied true justice,” said Eagleson, who leads a group of victims’ families pushing the US to release more of the documents of its investigations into the attacks.
A military medical panel last month diagnosed al-Shibh as having post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychosis, and linked it to his torture and solitary confinement during his four years in CIA custody immediately after his 2002 arrest.
Al-Shibh has said for years since his transfer to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay that his guards were attacking him, including by invisible rays, so as to deprive him of sleep and cause him pain.
McCall’s ruling said that psychological reports dating back at least to 2004 had documented al-Shibh’s mental issues.
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