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When a choose disqualified a prisoner final month from being a part of the conspiracy case within the Sept. 11 assaults, the ruling was primarily based on one discovering: a psychological well being board’s prognosis that the person, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, had post-traumatic stress dysfunction.
But, when the Pentagon launched a transcript of a pretrial listening to this week the place the prognosis was mentioned, each point out of PTSD was blacked out.
It’s the most recent instance of a generally baffling pick-and-choose strategy by censors to the general public document that emerges from Guantánamo Bay.
On Sept. 19, reporters, households of victims of the Sept. 11 assaults and a regulation scholar have been all watching the proceedings from the spectators’ gallery at courtroom when attorneys talked about “PTSD” or “post-traumatic stress dysfunction” 9 instances in two hours.
A courtroom safety officer by no means pushed the mute button on the audio, which spectators hear after a 40-second delay. The delay is a characteristic of the Guantánamo courtroom, not utilized in U.S. felony courts, to forestall the disclosure of categorized data.
However when the Pentagon launched the “unofficial/unauthenticated transcript” on its navy commissions web site, solely a secondary prognosis endorsed by prosecutors survived the censor’s marker.
“He has a delusional dysfunction,” Clayton G. Trivett Jr., a lead prosecutor, mentioned. “It doesn’t make him incompetent. It doesn’t make him unable to cooperate intelligently in his protection.”
Redactions of the general public document are the work of a shadowy group known as the SCDRT, or the Safety Classification/Declassification Overview Staff. For years, the Pentagon usually posted transcripts of public hearings inside 24 hours, generally on the identical day.
However it will possibly take weeks or months for safety officers to redact transcripts when public testimony includes the internal workings of Guantánamo’s jail or the C.I.A.’s abroad secret jail community, often called the black websites, the place prisoners have been tortured.
There was no speedy clarification for the redactions of PTSD.
David I. Bruck, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyer, has mentioned that his shopper’s situation resulted from “years and years of solitary confinement” and different types of torture within the black websites.
As a result of the choose eliminated Mr. bin al-Shibh from the case, 4 males now face a joint prosecution. The lead defendant is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who’s accused of being the mastermind behind the assaults that killed practically 3,000 folks on Sept. 11, 2001.
In courtroom on Friday, Gary D. Sowards, a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed, mentioned the unseen censors have been utilizing redactions “for public relations and tactical concerns, not for nationwide safety.”
“The C.I.A. tortured folks to the psychological incapacity to face trial,” he mentioned.
The prosecution didn’t reply.
However Col. Matthew N. McCall, the choose, replied that he didn’t attain that conclusion when he dominated that Mr. bin al-Shibh was mentally unfit and eliminated him from the case. The choose mentioned he had discovered no have to hyperlink any of the prisoner’s diagnoses to the C.I.A. program.
Colonel McCall agreed that some redactions “made little or no sense” as a result of the data that was blacked out drew no nationwide safety objections on the time it was spoken.
“I’ll see what I can put out to see that these type of redactions aren’t being made,” he mentioned, noting that the courtroom transcripts are dealt with by “a unique entity.”
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