1 Boring Old Man

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused’s sanity
Miami Herald
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
August  10,2009

U.S. military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh cannot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantánamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled. Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. He allegedly helped organize the Hamburg, Germany, cell of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers before the suicide mission that killed 2,974 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

But his lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder,” and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September. Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specific techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accused is … not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case.” The Miami Herald obtained a copy of the ruling Monday.

Prosecutors had invoked a national security privilege in seeking to shield the details from defense lawyers. They argue that Bin al Shibh is sane enough to stand trial with alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other alleged co-conspirators…

But Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni’s Pentagon appointed defense attorney, said court-approved mental health experts – as well as the judge – need to know the specifics to assess her client’s mental illness. If he suffers a long-standing psychosis, she said, he may never be made competent for trial. But if he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treatments that could make him competent.

Henley said he was relying on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Guantánamo detainees’ rights to contest their detention in refusing the military lawyers the details of Bin al Shibh’s secret "black site” interrogations before his September 2006 transfer to military custody. In Boumediene v. Bush, the judge noted, the justices said the courts must balance national security secrets with the right of an accused to challenge any evidence being used against him.

Our legal system never has known exactly how to deal with people who commit criminal acts that are psychotic. If they are deemed incompetent to stand trial, then what? One designation is NGRI [Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity]. Whether they are given this moniker or not, nobody knows what to do with them. But this case has some very high stakes. If this man did the things he is charged with, he was an active participant is the murder of 3000 people. But there’s even another twist in this case.

Usually, the assumption is that the "insane" person was insane when he committed the crime. That’s the point of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity category. In this case, a potential defense is that he was driven crazy by the C.I.A. during his interrogation – that he can’t stand trial because of his treatment after he committed the crime. The lawyer claims that either he is a chronically psychotic man who has not responded to psychotropic medication or he is a man driven mad by his interrogation. Then she suggests that maybe there’s some treatment that might reverse the madness caused by his interrogation, so he can stand trial. Frankly, I wonder myself what that treatment might be. Such cases are almost always impossible to resolve. What incentive would there be for the person to get "better?" So he could stand trial for a Capital Offense?

• What is it about the treatment of Ramzi Binalshibh that needs to be kept secret for National Security reasons?
• If his interrogation drove him insane, how can we argue that it wasn’t torture?

There are two trials here. In the first, a man is accused of being a suicide bomber who couldn’t go on the mission, but was probably an active accomplice in the bombing attack. In the second trial, our own leaders are accused of treating captives so inhumanely that we drove them crazy.