Military officials and a Department of Justice attorney jousted today about attorney-client communications with the defense team for the alleged mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombings, whose pretrial proceedings began at Guantanamo Bay.
The defense attorney for Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged al-Qaeda operative charged with overseeing the attack, made a variety of requests, according to the Armed Forces Press Service (AFPS): he wanted additional electronic security to guarantee that defense communications were not monitored by the government; wanted his client to be unrestrained during their meetings, which he requested take place in locked rooms; and challenged a government policy of reviewing detainee mail that creates the opportunity for legal communications to be seen by the government.
“It’s the appearance of confidentiality without the substance,” civilian defense attorney Richard Kammen said of the current electronic security policy, AFPS reports. Kammen also criticized the military tribunals as a whole, saying that they represented “at best, a second-class system of justice.”
U.S. Army Colonel James Pohl denied two motions from the defense, maintaining the policy of having Nashiri shackled when he meets with his attorneys and refusing “to establish an enclave — a protected network within the larger Defense Department computer network — [that the defense wanted] to keep DOD from monitoring the defense counsel’s computers and electronic communications,” AFPS reported. Pohl has not yet ruled on the question of allowing the government to review the detainee’s mail.
Nashiri is one of the al-Qaida operatives waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay. He worked for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network in 2000 when, allegedly, he helped plan a suicide bombing on the USS Cole, which was in a Yemeni harbor. Seventeen US sailors died when a small boat sailed up to the U.S. destroyer and detonated a bomb weighing several hundred pounds. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. Navy ship since 1987.
