>>8564854

Considering calendar shows canceled for 4 weeks starting March 16 and the a week of Easter break, think it is due to Coronavirus. The military has been cautious about virus containment and lawyers requently commute to and from Guantanamo during the week. Likely just cleared the schedule.

More concerning is the KSM trial does begin tilll Jan 2021. This is a prime example that the prior occupier of our White House denied justice to the American people and favored protecting his muslim brother.

KSM wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Sheikh_Mohammed

Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003, in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi by a combined operation of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Immediately after his capture, Mohammad was extraordinarily rendered to secret CIA prison sites in Afghanistan, then Poland, where he was interrogated by U.S. operatives. By December 2006, he had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In March 2007, after significant interrogations, Mohammed confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl, and various foiled attacks, as well as numerous other crimes. He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay detention camp which could carry the death penalty if convicted.

In 2012, a former military prosecutor criticized the proceedings as insupportable due to confessions gained under torture. A 2008 decision by the United States Supreme Court also drew into question the legality of the methods used to gain such admissions and the admissibility of such admissions as evidence in a criminal proceeding.

On August 30, 2019, a military judge set a trial date of January 11, 2021, for Mohammed's death penalty trial.

>>8564589 LB Notable GITMO 9/11 judge retires suddenly

USAF Col. Shane Cohen letter announcing his retirement

17 March 2020

MEMORANDUM FOR CHIEF TRIAL JUDGE, MILITARY COMMISSIONS

SUBJECT: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMAD, WALID

MUHAMMAD SALIH MUBARAK BIN ‘ATTASH, RAMZI BINALSHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ

ALI, MUSTAFA AHMED ADAM AL HAWSAWI

1. It is my duty to inform you that I have submitted my retirement from active duty in the

United States Air Force with an effective date of 1 July 2020. With terminal leave, my last day

of active duty service as a military judge will be 24 April 2020. Given my impending departure

from active duty it would seem prudent to detail a new military judge to this case.

1. My very recent decision to retire is based on the best interests of my family and was not

impacted by any outside influence from any source. I have neither sought nor will I seek

civilian employment from any party or other entity that could cause or create the appearance of

a conflict of interest as defined by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

opinion of In re Al-Nashiri, 921 F.3d 224 (D.C. Cir. 2019) while I remain the military judge for

this case or in the foreseeable future.

1. I stand ready to remain serving as the presiding judge in UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v.

KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMAD, WALID MUHAMMAD SALIH MUBARAK BIN ‘ATTASH,

RAMZI BINALSHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AHMED ADAM AL HAWSAWI until

24 April 2020 or an earlier date, if you deem it appropriate to detail another judge to the case at

that time.

W. SHANE COHEN, Colonel, USAF

Military Judge

Military Commissions Trial Judiciary

https://www.mc.mil/Portals/0/pdfs/KSM2/KSM%20II%20(AE001E).pdf

>>8565174

Col. Cohen’s Assignment To Guantanamo Bay Prison Article From June 2019

Began serving as a Military Tribunal judge June 2019 and now leaving April 2020.

He is the 3rd judge since 2012.

New Judge in the 9/11 Trial at Guantánamo Inherits a Complex History

(New York Times June 20 2019)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/politics/w-shane-cohen-guantanamo.html

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — When he took over this week as the judge in the military trial of the five defendants charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Col. W. Shane Cohen inherited 23,039 pages of public and secret transcripts; a vault with secret evidence withheld from defense lawyers by prosecutors invoking a national security exception; approximately 500 substantive legal case motions, some awaiting rulings; and more legal arguments and filings in the pipeline.

He is the third person since 2012 to preside over the complex, slow-moving proceedings, which have been bogged down over how to handle what the United States did to the terrorist suspects from 2002 to 2006 in the C.I.A.’s secret network of black sites.

More than 17 years have passed since the attacks by Al Qaeda — and seven since Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the plot, and four accused accomplices were arraigned in the case, which carries the death penalty — and Colonel Cohen could be the first judge to set a trial date.

On his first day on the bench, he described himself to lawyers in the case as a Mormon with “a very Jewish name” who felt shock but no anger over the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11.

He referred to the Sept. 11 defendants arrayed in front of him in the cavernous courtroom on the United States military base at Guantánamo Bay as “gentlemen” and addressed civilian defense lawyers as “sir” and “ma’am,” adopting a more courteous approach than the cutting, less indulgent judge, a Marine colonel, who presided before him.

Colonel Cohen said he had two years left on his current Air Force assignment, as a circuit judge based in Virginia, and nine years until mandatory retirement, meaning he could preside over the case for some time.

“I understand the seriousness of what we’re doing here,” he said.

His first day in court on Monday was devoted to letting lawyers question him on his qualifications and for potential bias, a practice in court-martial cases. It offered a window into the style, experience and thinking of Colonel Cohen, a 48-year-old career military lawyer, whose last assignment was as chief of the Air Force’s environmental law and litigation division.

“I do not recall ever being angry about anything that happened with Sept. 11,” he said, adding that he did not know a single victim of the attacks. On that day, he said, he was taking a defense lawyer’s course at the Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, across the Potomac River from the Pentagon.

When James Harrington, a defense lawyer representing Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the accused plotters, asked if the colonel was aware that the C.I.A. torture of the defendants “was a big issue in this case,” the judge responded, “I understand that the parties will be arguing over whether or not your clients were tortured.”

The judge was assigned to the case June 3. Since then, he said, he had “wondered” whether the United States Constitution applies to military commissions, and was hoping prosecutors and defense lawyers would help him “make the right decision.”

Mr. Harrington replied, “Welcome to the sewer, judge.”

The last judge, Col. Keith Parrella of the Marines, was impatient and decisive during his qualifications questioning. He took over the case in September, presided for nine months then became commander of Marine Corps security forces at United States Embassies worldwide.

(continued)

>>8565308

Col. Cohen’s Assignment To Guantanamo Bay Prison Article From June 2019

(continued)

Colonel Cohen appeared humble by contrast, asking at times how to pronounce the names of some in the courtroom, notably Mr. bin al-Shibh.

Mr. Mohammed, the lead defendant, sat about 30 feet away from the judge. His accused accomplices sat in rows behind him, two of them having brought shawls with images of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, demonstrating their affinity with the Palestinians.

The judge’s official biography shows he obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from the Brigham Young University. But, unprompted, he brought up his faith when he was asked about his attitude toward Israel’s conduct in the Middle East.

“I do have some relatives that are Jewish. I am not. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he said. “I believe that all people, men and women, should be able to worship how, where and what they may. I have no affiliations with the state of Israel, nor do I harbor any ill will toward the religion of Islam.”

When a defense lawyer pointed out that the question was not about his religious affiliation, the judge replied, “I wanted to just put that aside because I do realize it is a very Jewish name.”

He then noted that Israel “was recognized as a state” before he was born. “Whether or not that was the correct decision or not, that’s not my decision,” he said.

Colonel Cohen also said he had never been involved in a death-penalty or multiple-defendant case in his 20 years as a military lawyer. In 2003, a year he served as a defense lawyer at United States air bases in Turkey and Japan, he said, he took capital punishment defense training to become a “learned counsel,” a specialty recognized by the American Bar Association. Each Sept. 11 defendant has one, paid by the Pentagon.

A trial prosecutor, Clayton Trivett, had only one question, to which Colonel Cohen replied that he has not applied for a civilian job at the Justice or Defense Departments.

The question was important because a federal court this year invalidated about two years of pretrial rulings in the destroyer Cole trial, the other capital case at Guantánamo, because that case’s judge secretly negotiated with the Justice Department for a civilian immigration judge position while presiding in the case with a Justice Department prosecutor.

Colonel Cohen said he read that decision and took away a one-word lesson: “Disclose.”

>>8565174

Col Cohen Retires article

Military Judge in 9/11 Trial at Guantánamo Is Retiring

(New York Times March 25 2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/us/politics/guantanamo-judge-sept-11-trial.html

WASHINGTON — The military judge presiding in the Sept. 11 death penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has scheduled his retirement for later this year, in the latest blow to efforts to start the long-running trial in 2021.

The judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen, wrote in a one-page letter to the chief war court judge that he was ending his 21 years of Air Force service on July 1. Unless another judge is appointed sooner, he wrote, April 24 would be his last day presiding in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men who are accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,976 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

The looming departure of the judge, coupled with a current shutdown of legal team access to the United States Navy base prison zone because of the coronavirus pandemic, cast a shadow on the prospects of meeting the target start date of Jan. 11, 2021. A new judge has to be chosen, and he or she will need time to read the more than 33,150-page transcript of the case as well as hundreds of legal filings, some still awaiting rulings.

Colonel Cohen’s decision to leave the case also comes as he has been hearing testimony — and has scheduled more witnesses — in an ongoing set of hearings on the defense lawyers’ requests to exclude from the trial the F.B.I. interrogations of the men in 2007. The defense lawyers say those interrogations are tainted by the torture the defendants endured during their three and four years in secret C.I.A. prisons.

Although two psychologists who waterboarded Mr. Mohammed and designed the agency’s interrogation techniques as contractors testified earlier this year, their testimony has not yet been completed.

In his letter, dated March 17, Colonel Cohen said he was acting in “the best interests of my family and was not impacted by any outside influence from any source.” In an open session of the war court on June 17, Colonel Cohen told a defense lawyer that he believed “a court of this magnitude” needed “some level of continuity” that would “allow this case to move forward and for some continuity in rulings by the military judge.”

Colonel Cohen, the third judge in the case, was the first to set a trial date and an aggressive hearing and trial schedule that would have required long stretches of time at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba. In recent hearings, he had begun to suggest that the trial itself could start later than January 2021 and increased his trial time estimate to 12 to 13 months from his initial nine-month prediction.

The judge’s decision comes at a time of uncertainty about trial preparation during the coronavirus pandemic. Guantánamo this week disclosed that a sailor there was the first of its 6,000 residents to test positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Terry Rockefeller, who lost her sister Laura in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, said she was “outraged and deeply concerned about the likelihood of further delay. Judge Cohen purported to be committed to seeing the 9/11 trial through to a conclusion.”

The prison over the weekend halted legal meetings for all 40 wartime prisoners there.

All of the legal team members are based in the United States. Under a new policy, instituted in response to the virus outbreak, lawyers who obtain “mission essential status” to take a Navy air shuttle to Guantánamo must remain in isolation for two weeks at housing near the airstrip before being allowed to cross Guantánamo Bay to the site of the prison.

As of Wednesday, no prisoner had the virus, according to S. Maria Lohmeyer, a Navy commander and a spokeswoman for detention operations.

She said the guards and other detention center staff had planned “for weeks” and rehearsed “for the possibility of Covid-19,” including “scenarios that would require isolation.” She did not provide specifics but said the prison leadership had “implemented a layered defense that includes prevention and precautionary measures.”

>>8565174

USAF Col. Shane Cohen

List of prior United States Air Force Court of Military Criminal Appeals court cases and pdf files:

https://search.usa.gov/search?query=Col. Shane Cohen&affiliate=aflink&utf8=%26%23x2713%3B

pic: sample listing