9/11 Trial Judge Forbids Use of FBI Interrogations at Guantanamo

The judge in the death-penalty trial of those accused of carrying out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. has ruled that prosecutors may not use key FBI interrogations conducted at the Guantanamo prison soon after years of CIA black site abuse ended.

Under the war court system, confessions must be voluntary. So prosecutors had already pledged not to use what the captives told their CIA interrogators while they were questioned for years and tortured. Instead, as a substitute, prosecutors had planned to have FBI agents describe what the suspects told them soon after their September 2006 transfers to Guantanamo in supposedly consensual interviews.

But the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, excluded the FBI interviews, known as "clean team statements," from trial.

"Protective Order #4 will not allow the defense to develop the particularity and nuance necessary to present a rich and vivid account of the 3-4 year period in CIA custody the defense alleges constituted coercion," Pohl wrote in the ruling issued Friday. "In order to provide the defense with substantially the same ability to make a defense as would discovery of or access to the specific classified information, the government will not be permitted introduce any FBI Clean Team Statement from any of the accused for any purpose."

Defense attorneys, who have top-secret security clearances, argued that the prosecutors' cascading restrictions and threats over trying to find and question potential witnesses of their clients' torture, notably CIA agents, deprived the accused 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged accomplices of a fair trial.

Prosecutors countered that restrictions on defense attorneys were a national security necessity, and that the U.S. government had given defense lawyers enough CIA-screened and redacted documents or court-approved substitutions for evidence about the black sites, to let them try to get the Guantanamo interrogations excluded.

To defend prohibitions on defense investigations, chief prosecutor Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told the judge in a Jan. 11 hearing: "The mere seeking of interviews with people – and wandering up and ambushing people at the Piggly Wiggly – is a serious thing."

Cont.:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/08/19/9-11-trial-judge-forbids-use-fbi-interrogations-guantanamo.html

NARA Concludes Nearly Two-Thirds of Kavanaugh’s NARA-Reviewed WHCO Records are Restricted from Public

Majority of Kavanaugh’s WHCO records shared by Pres. Bush are public

WASHINGTON – After reviewing more than 35,000 emails sent by Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his service in the White House Counsel’s Office, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has concluded that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) restrict nearly two-thirds of those records from public access.

After processing records in response to requests for access, NARA must notify Presidents Bush and Trump of the results of its review and give the Presidents an opportunity to conduct their own review. In public letters to the PRA representatives for Presidents Bush and Trump, NARA stated that it had processed more than 35,000 records from Judge Kavanaugh’s service in the White House Counsel’s Office. The letters notified the Presidents that, in the independent judgment of the professional archival staff, the PRA and FOIA require NARA to restrict nearly two-thirds of those records from public release.

NARA and President Bush are conducting separate and independent reviews of the same material and are separately providing those materials to the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Bush has exercised his authority to access documents from his own administration and, after conducting a review, is providing them on an expedited basis to help the committee begin its review of Judge Kavanaugh’s record as quickly as possible. Separate from this process, NARA is reviewing the same materials in response to the committee’s formal request for access under the PRA. NARA will provide those documents to the committee on a rolling basis after it conducts the review required by the PRA and FOIA. The committee expects to receive from these two sources all non-privileged Presidential records that are responsive to the committee’s document request before the hearing begins on September 4.

To date, President Bush has provided the committee with more than 238,000 pages of documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s service as a White House lawyer, and has authorized the committee to release nearly two-thirds of those materials to the public.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/nara-concludes-nearly-two-thirds-of-kavanaughs-nara-reviewed-whco-records-are-restricted-from-public