Muslims hiding weapons in Korans at Gitmo, U.S. soldiers can’t search them

And apparently a write for the Miami Herald thinks even suggesting Korans would be used to hide contraband is an outrage and is vigorously investigating. via Qurans at crux of Guantánamo hunger strike – Guantánamo – MiamiHerald.com.

A senior Pentagon official said this week that Muslim captives at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have hidden weapons inside their copies of the Quran, a claim the U.S. military has yet to substantiate.

“There have, in the past, been incidents of detainees storing contraband in their Qurans; items found have included improvised weapons, unauthorized food and medicine,” wrote William K. Lietzau, deputy assistant secretary of defense for rule of law and detainee policy.

He made the claim in a one-letter dated April 1 to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York law firm. The firm wrote Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on March 14, seeking a meeting to discuss the ongoing hunger strike at the Guantánamo prison, which they said started over a Feb. 2 Quran search and grew to present “a serious threat to the health and life of detainees.”

Lietzau, responding for Hagel, offered a broad defense of Quran search policy and told the lawyers he was “aware of reports that many detainees are engaged in a hunger strike.”

The Miami Herald has been asking the military since mid-March to provide specific details, including photographs, of items found concealed in detainees’ Qurans. n light of the Lietzau letter, The Herald asked additionally for specific incident reports. No details have been provided.

A dispute over Quran searches has been the underlying issue of the hunger strike that lawyers for the captives say is more widespread than the military acknowledges. On Friday, Navy medical staff considered 41 of the 166 detainees to be weak enough or to have lost enough weight to be classified as hunger strikers. Eleven were getting tube feedings of nutritional supplements, the camps said, and no hunger strikers were hospitalized.

Durand said the Quran searches Feb. 2 went this way in Camp 6, the communal camp where the hunger strike started: Guards collected the Qurans without touching them, in what looked like “a postal box,” and then turned them over to a Muslim linguist for inspection. The prison has not said whether that search yielded any contraband.

When Durand was asked for specific examples, he replied with a general statement: “We always find contraband,” he said in an email Wednesday morning. “Every search, every time. From improvised weapons (clubs, shanks, knives, garottes) to hoarded medications to unauthorized electronics (audio/video recorders, games, etc.). Sometimes in the Quran, but every search results in something.”

Carol Rosenberg – one of Gitmo al Qaeda’s leading advocates at the Miami Herald – finds it hard to believe that Muslim terrorists would do such a thing. After all, they are most pious.

Remember the Korans that were incinerated (not burned as reported by the media) in Afghanistan that caused massive rioting and more than 30 deaths including a U.S. teacher and at least six U.S. soldiers all at the hands of Muslims? Those Korans were incinerated because Muslim prisoners desecrated them with their names, stories, communications to other prisoners and outside contacts, and coordinated attack plans on the pages of the supposedly holy books. Yet Obama lied about that too – he said the “burning” was an accident and the U.S. troops were punished.

At Gitmo, where sharia law reigns, U.S. soldiers not only can’t search the Korans, they can’t even TOUCH the Korans paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/05/3325688_p2/qurans-at-crux-of-guantanamo-hunger.html#storylink=cpy

Sep 11 trial threatened by U.S. govt’s legal wrangling

Eleven years since 9/11 and four years since Obama/Holder took over and the U.S. government has yet to prosecute the 9/11 mastermind who already confessed to being “responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z”. The legal wrangling is 100% internal between U.S. government officials.   via September 11 trial threatened by legal dispute – Telegraph.

The US defence department is at loggerheads with the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay over what the charges should be. The five men, whose pretrial hearings reconvene at the naval base next week, face eight different charges.

However, Brig Gen Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor, said the charge of conspiracy should be dropped because it was no longer “legally viable” following a court ruling that conspiracy – a charge that seeks to punish suspects for association with al-Qaeda – was not a recognised war crime under international law. This meant it could not legitimately be brought before a war-crimes tribunal such as Guantánamo.

The ruling by an appeals court in Washington DC overturned the conviction against Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, and has also undermined the conviction of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made al-Qaeda propaganda films.

Gen Martins said retaining the conspiracy charges against the September 11 suspects could leave the prosecution open to “legal challenge” and cause “uncertainty and delay”. However, Guantánamo Bay’s “convening authority” – a branch of the Pentagon – said it would be “premature” to drop the conspiracy charges, hoping that the Supreme Court might reinstate their legality.

Richard Kammen, the lead counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was convicted in Yemen over the bombing of USS Cole but is also facing conspiracy charges at Guantánamo, said the government had seriously undermined Gen Martins’s position as chief prosecutor. “The sub-context of this is, ‘Who’s in charge?’ And to what extent does Gen Martins have any real authority in this case, other than to give speeches?” said Mr Kammen.

He added that preserving the conspiracy charges could open the door to an appeal against all the charges being faced by the September 11 co-conspirators and al-Nashiri. “If one of the main charges was conspiracy, and that was reversed, you would expect the appellate court to recognise that so impacted the rest of the trial that any other conviction would have to be reversed as well,” he said.

Gen Martins has indicated that he plans to press ahead with his request by petitioning the military judge in the September 11 trial to strike out conspiracy as a separate charge.

That would present the judge, Col James Pohl, 61, with the unenviable choice of either denying the requests of both defence and prosecution lawyers, or overruling his court’s own convening authority.

Col Morris Davis, a former Guantánamo chief prosecutor who resigned in 2007 in protest at the Pentagon meddling in the tribunals, said the dispute between two major government departments undermined the credibility of the tribunals.

He suggested that the government was clinging to the conspiracy charges because they were needed in cases against many of the detainees.

“They don’t need conspiracy charges in the major cases like the September 11 attacks, where they are just a safety net or fallback charge,” he said. “The problem is that for a lot of lesser cases, that’s about all you could ever charge with.”

Senate Approves Measure to Prevent Transfer of Gitmo Detainees to U.S. Soil

via Kelly Ayotte – United States Senator. h/t @CausingFitna

WASHINGTON, DC – During consideration of the annual defense authorization bill, the Senate tonight approved an amendment introduced by U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) that would prevent terrorist detainees from being transferred from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to American soil. The measure was approved by a vote of 54 to 41.

“The top-rate facility at Guantanamo allows for the secure and humane detention of foreign terrorist detainees. With a specially-designed courtroom, it is singularly equipped to safeguard intelligence that is critical to protecting our country,” said Senator Ayotte. “The administration may want to close Guantanamo, but the American people do not want foreign terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed brought to the United States.”

As a member of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Ayotte has worked to keep open the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility, keep terrorist detainees out of the United States, and limit the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to foreign countries. Last year, Senator Ayotte introduced the Detaining Terrorists to Secure America Act (S. 944), bipartisan legislation that would keep open the Guantanamo Bay facility for the detention and interrogation of current and future terrorists. The bill would also permanently limit the transfer of detainees to foreign countries.

A minor impediment for Obama and Holder as Michelle Malkin writes, Gitmo North returns: Obama’s shady prison deal:

If you thought President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder had given up on closing Guantanamo Bay and bringing jihadists to American soil, think again. Two troubling developments on the Gitmo front should have every American on edge.

…

Sen. Durbin told a local Illinois paper that “the decision to move ahead came directly from President Barack Obama” and that he had secured the green light during a discussion on Air Force One earlier in the spring.

…

The shady deal “directly violates the clear objection of the House Appropriations Committee and goes against the bipartisan objections of members in the House and Senate, who have noted that approving this request would allow Thomson to take precedence over previously funded prisons in Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Hampshire.”

…

On Wednesday, in response to a whistleblowing report from Fox News homeland security reporter Catherine Herridge, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) released a General Accounting Office report exploring the feasibility of transferring the Gitmo gang to civilian prisons.

Lo and behold, Feinstein concluded, the report “demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security.”

Obama Bypasses Congress, Orders DOJ to Buy Illinois Prison – For Gitmo Terrorists?

Obama is still trying to bring Gitmo terrorists into the U.S. Andrew C. McCarthy sums it up in a recent article exposing the bi-partisan complicity, via Obama Flouts Congress, Orders DOJ to Buy White-Elephant Illinois Prison

Obama has been blocked by bipartisan congressional opposition. So, as is his wont, he is now imperiously ignoring the naysayers, and has directed the Justice Department to go ahead and buy the prison from Illinois, using “unobligated” funds in Justice’s budget.

The move is drawing irate responses from key members of Congress, such as Representatives Frank Wolf and Hal Rogers of the House Appropriations Committee, and Pete King, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee. But the question, of course, is whether they will do anything about it. Congress is not without remedies here; it can start slashing money from the Justice Department’s budget and other areas where the administration will feel it. To this point, though, despite serial provocations, they’ve shown no indication of a willingness to do that.

The Republican establishment, which gets cover from the Republican punditocracy, lamely claims that the GOP only controls “one-half of one-third of the government” and therefore can’t do anything about Obama’s profligacy as long as he is backed in it by the Democrat-controlled Senate. It is nonsense: Can you imagine the Supreme Court ever saying, “Gee, we can’t foist our preferences on the country because, after all, we’re only one-third of the government — and we’re not even elected”? We don’t have separation of powers by percentage; we have separation of powers by constitutionally assigned responsibilities.

…

“GOP leaders want you to think that, when an executive agency like the Justice Department goes rogue, they are simply powerless to start slashing its budget. But the spending and the taxes necessary to support executive malfeasance can happen only with the House’s complicity.”

…

There is no reason why Congress can’t enact a law saying, “not one penny of public money for Thomson,” and dare Democrats to vote against it in an election year. All they need is the will to do it.

Of course, they’d need to be in session to exhibit that will, but they are not. Speaker Boehner orchestrated one of the earliest election-year congressional exoduses from Washington in the last half-century — and in the four months from August 3 through Congress’s scheduled post-election return on November 14, our lawmakers will have put in eight days of work. In sum, then, the brazen Obama directive to buy the white-elephant jail is a window into what Americans can expect from an Obama second term — or even, if Romney should win, from the ten weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Imagine Obama, no longer concerned about political accountability, and confronted by a Congress that, for all its whining, is unwilling to use the powers the framers gave it to rein in a runaway executive. He will govern against the will of the American people: opening Thomson; closing Gitmo; transferring the Blind Sheik; funding the Muslim Brotherhood; supporting the Brotherhood and its Islamist allies in Syria just as he did in Libya and Egypt; closing Gitmo; showing Putin “more flexibility” on our defenses; moving ahead with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on restricting free speech; signing the U.S. on to other unpopular international conventions; and so on. Maybe we can take ten more weeks of this stuff, but four more years . . . ?

Vote them all out. Starting at the top.

Bob McCarty has more in Here We Go Again: GITMO Detainees Coming to Illinois? and video of Band of Mothers on this issue, Could new federal prison house Gitmo detainees? White House bypasses Congress

U.S. military court at Gitmo observing Ramadan, 9/11 trials postponed

We told you previously that the U.S. military submitted to sharia at Gitmo. Prayer breaks & prayer rugs for terrorists in Gitmo courtroom

Now they observe Ramadan, the month of jihad, too. Jihad Watch notes it was the terrorists who demanded the delay. via AP.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A U.S. military judge agreed Monday to postpone the next court hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison for five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks to avoid a conflict with the Muslim holy period of Ramadan.

The judge issued a short order postponing the next pretrial hearings at the U.S. base in Cuba until Aug. 22-26 at the request of all five defendants, said James Connell, a lawyer for one of the accused.

The hearings had been scheduled to run from Aug. 8-12, which fall during the last 10 days of Ramadan, a period in which devout Muslims fast during the day and pray during the night. That would make it difficult for the accused to participate in their defense, said Connell, a lawyer for Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali.

“It’s very difficult to pay attention to sometimes intricate legal proceedings when you haven’t had any sleep and you haven’t had any food,” Connell said.

The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, denied a defense request not to hold any future hearings in the case on Fridays, a day on which many Muslims do not work and his order does not mention what will happen if future hearings fall during the month of Ramadan. The judge did not explain his decisions in the brief ruling.

Military prosecutors had opposed a defense motion to prohibit any hearings on Fridays or during Ramadan, saying to do so would eliminate about 20 percent of potential hearing dates from the calendar and make it difficult to schedule court sessions at the remote base.

The five defendants were arraigned at Guantanamo in May on charges that include murder and terrorism for their alleged roles aiding the Sept. 11 attacks, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has told authorities that he was the mastermind of the plot, and all five could get the death penalty if convicted.

The judge will consider a number of procedural motions during the next round of pretrial hearings in the case. The actual trial is not expected to begin for at least a year.

Prayer breaks & prayer rugs for terrorists in Gitmo courtroom

Maybe shutting down sharia-compliant Gitmo isn’t such a bad idea. via Judge sets Guantanamo hearings for Ramadan, 9/11 anniversary – Americas – Stripes.

The Pentagon in the past has convened military commissions sessions at Guantanamo during Ramadan, presenting a bit of a logistical challenge to the prison camps’ staff that shuttle the accused several miles across the base from the detention center to the bay-front compound where the trials are held.

During Ramadan, the military typically has upended its schedule to provide meals to the prison camps at night and meet the captives’ religious needs.

Earlier this month, when Pohl presided at the arraignment of the 9/11 accused, on a Saturday, the hearing spanned 13 hours and included three scheduled prayer breaks for the accused. The men unfurled their prison-approved prayer rugs on the floor of the maximum-security courtroom, and worshipped on the spot.

Islam means submission, kufar.

Terror attorney in hijab requests all Gitmo women submit to sharia

via Attorney in hijab defends call for other women at 9/11 hearing to wear ‘appropriate’ clothing | Fox News.

The defense attorney who wore a traditional Islamic outfit during the rowdy arraignment of the accused Sept. 11 terrorists is defending her courtroom appeal that other women in the room wear more “appropriate” clothing to the proceedings — out of respect for her client’s Muslim beliefs.

Cheryl Bormann, counsel for defendant Walid bin Attash, attended the arraignment Saturday dressed in a hijab, apparently because her client insisted on it. She further requested that the court order other women to follow that example so that the defendants do not have to avert their eyes “for fear of committing a sin under their faith.”

At a press conference Sunday at Guantanamo Bay, Bormann said she dresses in a hijab at “all times” when she meets with her client “out of respect” for his beliefs. Asked why she requested other women do the same, Bormann said, “When you’re on trial for your life, you need to be focused.”

Bormann, who is not Muslim, claimed the issue came up several years ago, when a paralegal wore “very short skirts” and it became a distraction for the defendants. She said that on Saturday, “somebody” was also dressed “in a way that was not in keeping with my client’s religious beliefs.”

“If because of someone’s religious beliefs, they can’t focus when somebody in the courtroom is dressed in a particular way, I feel it is incumbent upon myself as a counsel to point that out and ask for some consideration from the prosecution,” she said. “Suffice to say it was distracting to members of the accused.”

The clothing request was just one of several unusual moments during Saturday’s lengthy and chaotic hearing.

The court hearing for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants should have taken a couple of hours at most. Instead it lasted almost 13 hours, including meal and prayer breaks, as the men appeared to make a concerted effort to stall Saturday’s hearing.

They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge, wouldn’t listen to Arabic translations over their head sets and one even insisted on having the more than 20 pages detailing the charges against them read aloud, rather than deferred for later in their case as the judge wanted, which added more than two hours to the proceedings.

“They’re engaging in jihad in a courtroom,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles, was the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pentagon. She watched the proceeding from Brooklyn.

Just in time for election, 9/11 mastermind to face Gitmo trial, death penalty

How convenient. via KSM Finally to Face 9/11 Capital Trial.

Nine years after his arrest, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is finally to face justice before a military court at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday.

He and four other men could all face the death sentence if found guilty in the long-delayed trial, the Defense Department said in a statement.

The charges allege that the five are “responsible for the planning and execution of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Shanksville, Pa., resulting in the killing of 2,976 people.”

Mohammed was born in Kuwait and holds joint Kuwaiti, Pakistani, and Bosnian citizenship. Charged alongside him are his nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a Pakistani; two Yemeni citizens, Ramzi Binalshibh and Walid Bin Attash, and a Saudi, Mustafa al Hawsawi.

They were originally charged in 2008 but the trial was suspended after President Barack Obama’s election. He insisted they should face a civilian court in New York.

However after years of wrangling and stiff opposition from Congress, Obama backed down and last year Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the cases would revert back to military court.

Charges against the five were refiled in June and on Wednesday Ret. Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, who oversees the military commissions, sent the case to trial.

According to the Defense Department statement the five men face charges of “terrorism, hijacking aircraft, conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, and destruction of property in violation of the law of war.” An arraignment will be held in May at Guantanamo, where the five are being held. The men will all be tried in one joint trial.

In the original trial the defendants expressed interest in pleading guilty so they could be executed and “die as martyrs.” Mohammed ­ who has admitted that he personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 ­ was captured by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and handed over to the U.S. Three years later President George W. Bush revealed that he had been held in secret by the CIA before being transferred to Guantanamo.

The Washington Post reported that one of the major issues in the trial will be the waterboarding that Mohammed underwent while in the hands of the CIA.

“Under the reformed system of military commissions, prosecutors cannot use as evidence any statement that resulted from torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment,” reported the paper. “But attorneys for the accused are nonetheless likely to make it a central plank on any defense against the death penalty.”

Immediately the American Civil Liberties Union attacked the decision to try the men in what it called “a second-tier system of justice.” “Whatever verdict comes out of the Guantanamo military commissions will be tainted by an unfair process and the politics that wrongly pulled these cases from federal courts, which have safely and successfully handled hundreds of terrorism trials,” said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero.

Flashback: KSM Already Pled Guilty and Asked for Death Penalty. KSM also joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was 16 years old. So the Obama admin is trying a Muslim Brotherhood member in a capital mass murder case while hosting the Muslim Brotherhood at the White House.

Again, how convenient would a conviction of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind be leading up to the election? Just in time to coincide with releases of supposed bin Laden photos and grainy video?

Al-Qaeda Bar Advancing Inside DOJ

Valuable information you simply won’t get from the cartel media, via Rule of Law » Al-Qaeda Bar Advancing Inside DOJ.

President Obama has promoted Tony West to the number three job at the Department of Justice – associate attorney general. The former Civil Division head will oversee a wide array of issues, including enforcement of federal election laws in the 2012 presidential election, but also GITMO detainee policy. Before coming to the Justice Department, West and his San Francisco law firm represented some of the most radical Islamic terrorist causes, including the American Taliban John Walker Lindh.

West’s firm also was involved in the case of Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, effectively attacking the CIA high value detainee rendition program. They also assisted the defense of Mohammed Al Qahtani, considered the 20th hijacker. But naturally, you won’t learn any of this in Sari Horwitz’s Washingon Post announcement of West’s promotion.

West is not alone among new Obama DOJ lawyers who represented radical causes. West brought more members of the al-Qaeda bar with him to the Civil Division at Justice to oversee GITMO policy. As Jennifer Rubin has reported at the Weekly Standard, West also failed to recuse himself, it seems, from terrorist cases his firm worked on even after West arrived at the Justice Department.

Most disturbing of all, Rubin reports that these members of the GITMO bar which West placed in charge of GITMO policy may have failed to recuse themselves sufficiently. Rubin:

Other attorneys in the civil division who came from firms that represented detainees—such as Brian Martinez (West’s chief of staff), Geoffrey Graber (counsel to the assistant attorney general), and Ian Gershengorn (West’s deputy in charge of the Federal Programs Branch, which handles habeas petitions)—recused themselves from individual cases where their former firms represented detainees. Gershengorn, however, continued to play a role in setting policy on issues relating to his prior cases. In an email dated July 14, 2009, he wrote, “I have realized that, while I can discuss policy issues arising from substantial support etc., I cannot work directly on the brief because it is one of the Boumediene cases, and Jenner had an amicus brief in that case.” (This begs the question of who, if anyone, was supervising the habeas petitions and the matters from which the political appointees were recused.)

West’s representation of Lindh, however, is particularly troubling. Even after Lindh was sentenced, and the case was concluded, West made outrageous statements to the Washington Post defending Lindh as a good person. “He’s so intellectually-driven, and he has a wide variety of interests — from English literature to World History to Islamic studies. I truly believe John will have a lot to offer after his incarceration.”

Left-wing defenders like to crow that everyone deserves a right to a lawyer. Fine, but that doesn’t mean you get to work at the Justice Department, and certainly doesn’t mean you should be setting GITMO policy.

…

The Pulitzer-nominated PJ Media Every Single One series provides the backgrounds of 113 attorneys hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division. You’ll see that the West promotion is nothing unusual inside this DOJ.

113 attorneys hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division. Read about them and ponder what the next four years will be like. More here: Taliban Defense Attorney now No. 3 at Obama DOJ (video).

Baltimore grad held at Gitmo charged in jihad plot

via Pentagon charges former US resident in terror plot – College Times

MIAMI — The Pentagon announced Tuesday it had charged a suburban Baltimore high school graduate now at Guantanamo with conspiring to commit terror attacks on U.S. soil and serving as an al-Qaida courier after the 9/11 attacks.

The prosecution of Majid Khan, who was scooped up in Pakistan and disappeared into the CIA’s secret overseas prison network, is the first war court case entirely initiated during the administration of President Barack Obama.

It seeks life imprisonment, not military execution, in a charge sheet that portrays Khan, now 31, as a willing foot soldier for radical Islam. He allegedly recorded a martyr’s message and donned an explosive vest in a 2002 attempt to kill Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at a mosque. The attack failed because Musharraf never arrived.

Pakistani authorities arrested Khan the next year and turned him over to the United States, which held and interrogated him out of reach of the International Committee of the Red Cross until President George W. Bush had him sent to the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba in September 2006 for a war crimes trial.

Khan’s case is an unusual one for the Guantanamo war court. He’s a fluent English speaker whose family moved from his native Pakistan in 1996, in time for him to graduate from an American high school and work at the family’s gas station outside of Baltimore.

The last known photos of him before his capture show a clean-shaven young man waving a diploma and donning a mortar board. His Guantanamo intelligence file photo, released by WikiLeaks last year, shows a bushy-bearded adult with a receding hairline. He’s one of just two known former legal U.S. residents now held at Guantanamo.

Part of his charge sheet alleges he conspired with confessed 9/11 attack planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also at Guantanamo, to blow up gasoline stations on U.S. soil.

Khan was married and living in Pakistan at the time of his arrest. He had allegedly traveled back to the United States on his green card after the Sept. 11 attacks at Mohammed’s behest, and he allegedly couriered $50,000 to Bangkok that was funneled to an al-Qaida affiliate that blew up the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2003, killing 11 and wounding 81 others.

He is defended by the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose lawyers have filed an unlawful detention suit claiming Khan was tortured.

In 2008, the New York civil liberties firm released portions of letters from Khan describing himself as an innocent, onetime U.S. resident who paid $2,400 a month in U.S. taxes and who was caught in a “big mistake” by the CIA.

“I ask you to give me justice,” one letter said, “in the name of what U.S.A. once stood for and in the name of what Thomas Jefferson fought for… allow me a chance to prove that I am innocent.”

A copy of the 15-page charge sheet posted on a Pentagon website Tuesday night indicated that the prison camps staff attorney, Navy Cmdr. Thomas Welsh, presented Khan with the charges a day earlier. The charges, and a Defense Department announcement, identified him as Majid Shoukat Khan, perhaps in a bid to make a distinction between him and a famed former Pakistan cricket team captain also named Majid Khan.

Jihadi magazine got into Gitmo cell

If true, is this really shocking? There have been soldiers who converted to Islam at Gitmo, there is a bounty of free or paid lawyers working for the terrorists, and the U.S. military employs sharia to govern how guards perform their duties. via US says al-Qaida magazine got into Guantanamo cell | World news | The Guardian.

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — A copy of a magazine published by an arm of al-Qaida made its way to a terror suspect at the Guantanamo Bay prison, leading to an inspection of cells and a contentious new policy requiring special review teams to examine correspondence between prisoners and attorneys, U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday.

Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart told a military judge during a pre-trial hearing that a copy of Inspire magazine got into a cell. She provided no details on who received the magazine or how. But she said the breach showed that prior rules at the base governing mail review were not adequate. Yemen’s al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula launched the online, English-language magazine in 2010. An early issue contained tips to would-be militants about how to kill U.S. citizens.

Lockhart is part of the U.S. team prosecuting the case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national charged with orchestrating the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors. Al-Nashiri, 47, is considered one of the most senior al-Qaida leaders. He has been held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006 after spending several years held by the CIA in a series of secret prisons.

Rick Kammen, a civilian attorney for al-Nashiri, told reporters on that his client was not the recipient of the magazine and was not involved in the incident.

How mail between Guantanamo prisoners and their attorneys should be handled consumed several hours of the al-Nashiri’s pre-trial session on Tuesday and Wednesday. At issue is whether even a cursory examination of the legal correspondence violates the attorney-client privilege.

The dispute reflects the untested nature of this latest attempt to resume the military tribunals at Guantanamo. The prosecution of al-Nashiri is already underway and the U.S. is preparing to prosecute five other prisoners accused in the Sept. 11 attacks, yet defense lawyers and government prosecutors are still fighting to establish basic legal ground rules.

The military commission system has been revised by the Obama administration and Congress, which has refused to allow the administration to move prisoners from the American base in Cuba. The trial system is still sharply criticized by civil and human rights groups and defense lawyers who say the procedures favor the prosecution. Kammen has called the military commissions a “second-class system of justice.”

But former members of the Cole crew and family members of several of the sailors killed on the ship who spoke to reporters at Guantanamo on Wednesday said al-Nashiri is getting better legal treatment than he deserves. “It’s been over 11 years now since the Cole was bombed,” retired Chief Petty Officer Paul Abney said.

He urged that the military commission be allowed to do its work, adding: “They are doing their job to be as fair and honest as possible.”

Al-Nashiri’s defense team, as well as the lawyers for other Guantanamo prisoners and the chief defense counsel for the military commissions, are opposed to the security review of legal mail, which was put in place last month by Navy Rear Adm. David Woods, the prison commander.

Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in al-Nashiri’s case, ordered the detention center in November to stop Guantanamo guards from reading mail between the prisoner and his lawyers. The judge’s order came after Woods authorized an inspection of detainee cells in October that included reading mail between prisoners and their attorneys.

In late December, Woods issued a new directive requiring legal mail to undergo a security review to ensure prisoners were not receiving prohibited materials, such as top-secret information or objects that might be fashioned into weapons.

The December order from Woods created a “privilege review team” independent of the prison staff that would include attorneys, law enforcement and intelligence experts who would examine legal communications between lawyers and their clients. The goal of the order, prison officials said, was to ensure safety and security on the base while preserving attorney-client privilege by having a group not under the prison’s command perform the mail review.

Wood testified on Tuesday that the privilege team is made up of contractors hired by the Pentagon’s intelligence directorate.

Al-Nashiri’s mail has not yet been examined by the team. Marine Col. Jeffrey Colwell, the chief defense counsel for the Guantanamo Bay tribunals, instructed attorneys not to follow Woods’ order. Colwell said last week that the rule does not adequately protect attorney-client privilege and violates codes of professional conduct.

But Woods testified that his order doesn’t allow team members to read mail. Their role, he said, is to perform a “plain sight review” of correspondence between attorneys and their clients to ensure the documents are marked with the proper stamps to ensure it is actually privileged information.