GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (CN) — Restricting the phone access of five men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks violates international and U.S. law, attorneys told a military judge Wednesday.
One member of the defense team for Walid bin Attash, an alleged senior al-Qaida lieutenant, argued Wednesday that current policies at Guantanamo Bay restricting detainee communication with family members makes it difficult for the men to participate in their defense.
"Where we are today, the level of communication we have today, amounts to pretrial punishment," Michael Schwartz said in court this morning.
Bin Attash's representatives noted in particular that the government has refused to screen and transmit. a video message the detainee recorded for his family in 2014.
Detainees have the opportunity to record such videos once every quarter, explained James Connell, learned counsel for accused 9/11 financier Ammar al Baluchi.
Connell explained that the videos are then translated, reviewed for 10 to 15 minutes, and then beamed to family members at Red Cross facilities.
The family members on the other side then can record a two-to-three minute response.
This arrangement allows some communication with family members, Connell conceded, but said it is not the real-time conversation the detainees would like and that he claims is required.
Col. James Pohl, the military judge presiding over these pretrial proceedings, grilled Connell on this point.
"So they have that communication and you don't like that," Pohl asked. "You want more than that."
After the government refused to send his video in 2014, bin Attash asked the prosecution to turn over information related to the messages he had sent to his family. He specifically wanted to know about the government's decision to not screen the message in question.
The prosecution quickly denied the request, concluding the message was "self-serving," an argument repeated in court Wednesday.
Schwartz began his arguments before Pohl this morning by saying he often tried to imagine what it would be like to have a child "kidnapped," as he suggested bin Attash was from his family. Having no children himself, only dogs, Schwartz said he still tried to place himself in the position of bin Attash's family.
The members of bin Attash's family had no information about where he was while he was held in CIA custody and didn't know he was alive until relatively recently, Schwartz said.
"The impact of that incommunicado detention, as well as the conditions of confinement at Guantanamo, are significant," Schwartz told the court.
As with his four accused co-conspirators, bin Attash was reportedly held in a CIA black site and subjected to some of the agency's harshest torture techniques before being sent to the remote and secretive detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Schwartz questioned how the "incommunicado" detention affected his client's well-being and said it also hurt his ability to contact bin Attash's family to get details about his life that would help in his defense.
"That has an undeniable chilling effect on a defense team's ability to develop mitigating information," Schwartz said.
The government countered that bin Attash's discovery request was overbroad and not based on any legitimate need for the defense team.