On Monday morning, two days before the 18th anniversary of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pakistani engineer accused of masterminding the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., appeared in a Guantánamo Bay courtroom sporting a black turban. Seated near him was his new lead attorney, Gary D. Sowards, a death penalty specialist who represented the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; Kaczynski is now serving a life sentence.
In the second row, Mohammed’s co-defendant Walid bin Attash, a native of Yemen, draped a scarf displaying a Palestinian flag over his computer monitor. Rows three to five were occupied by defendants Ramzi bin al-Shibh; Mohammed’s nephew Ammar al-Baluchi; Mustafa al-Hawsawi; and their defense teams.
For years, the defense had been seeking access to witnesses who could testify about whether detainees’ statements to FBI “clean teams” were sufficiently separated in time from their “enhanced interrogations” to make their statements voluntary. But the structural integration of the FBI into the RDI described by Connell casts doubt on the “cleanliness” of those teams.
Connell intends to call Mueller to testify in the case.
Additional unclassified information Connell pulled from the new classification guidance included confirmation that detainees Hawsawi, bin al-Shibh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were held and questioned at a specific black site in Guantánamo called Echo 2 between late 2003 and early 2004. That is the same location where they were questioned after being returned to Guantánamo in September 2006 and where detainee meetings with defense attorneys are still held.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
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