Tag: Guantanamo

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Costs in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo

Charges in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo

The three prisoners’ lawyers also told the judge that in 2020 the court’s official Indonesian translator believed that “the government is wasting money on these terrorists; they should have been killed long ago, ”adding that they had an affidavit from a witness who heard the comment. The public prosecutor’s office demands life imprisonment in the case.

Mr. Bin Lep’s attorney, Brian Bouffard, declared the Indonesian-American contract translator to be “irretrievably biased.” Mr. Bin Amin’s attorney, Christine Funk, asked why the prosecutors even needed an interpreter when bringing charges: “Are you spying on us? I do not know.”

The Trial Judge, Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen, tried to fix the problems. He gave the court’s official translation team a 10-minute break every 20 minutes. He urged defense attorneys to file legal motions if they believed there were problems of interpretation that required remedial action. And he postponed the reading of the charges until Tuesday, which was the reason for the hearing on Monday.

Both civilian and military defense attorneys, all paid by the Pentagon, said the case was still in its infancy. Prosecutors, they said, provided perhaps 2 percent of the pre-trial documents that could be used in the case, including reports of interrogations the FBI conducted with the detainees in 2007 shortly after they were transferred to military custody by the CIA was.

Mr. Hambali’s attorney, James R. Hodes, described the case as “absurd,” in part because of his client’s long prison term and nearly two decades late in bringing charges against him. He told reporters before the hearing that Mr. Hambali had been “brutalized” and had spent at least half of his detention in solitary confinement. He said the prisoner was due “an apology” and repatriation “to avoid being held in a cage on a Caribbean island.”

The hearings in Guantánamo took place mainly between English and Arabic, but also had translation problems. In 2015, one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks blurted out in court by the name of a translator – revealing that the linguist had previously worked for the CIA in a black place, his identity and derailed a week of hearings.

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Freed Guantánamo Bay Detainee Is Reunited With Household

Freed Guantánamo Bay Detainee Is Reunited With Family

Former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Latif Nasser was reunited with his family in Casablanca after US troops transferred him to Moroccan state custody, his lawyers said Tuesday.

US troops flown 56-year-old Mr Nasser on Sunday during the first release of a prisoner from prison by the Biden government from Guantánamo Bay. American and Moroccan officials had approved security arrangements for his return in the last few days of the Obama administration, but the deal was put on hold when President Donald J. Trump halted all transfers when he took office.

“He’s excited,” said Bernard E. Harcourt, a New York-based attorney and law professor who represented Mr. Nasser in federal court. He and his co-lawyer Thomas Anthony Durkin telephoned Mr Nasser in his family home in Casablanca and said that the former prisoners of more than 19 years were in a good mood. He was particularly supported by reuniting with extended family members who had gathered for Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday known as the Festival of Sacrifice, Harcourt added.

“He said it was great for him to go home when his whole family was around,” said Harcourt.

Mr Nasser’s legal status in his home country was unclear. He was held for a period in a prison near Casablanca on Monday, and Moroccan judicial officials said in a statement that police are investigating him for alleged involvement in terrorism.

The investigation was not unusual. Former Moroccan citizens repatriated from Guantánamo have been detained for days, if not months, and some have been charged with terrorist offenses.

London-based law firm and human rights firm Reprieve said in a statement that Mr. Nasser would not be conducting interviews with news organizations “for the foreseeable future”. He quoted him in the statement as saying that although he was born on March 4th, he considered himself “born again” on July 19th, the day he was released from US military custody.

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Guantánamo Prosecutors Ask to Strike Data Gained From Torture

Guantánamo Prosecutors Ask to Strike Information Gained From Torture

WASHINGTON — Military prosecutors have asked to wipe from the record information gleaned from the torture of a detainee now held at Guantánamo Bay, reversing their earlier position that the information could be used in pretrial proceedings against the man.

By law, prosecutors in a military commission trial are forbidden to submit evidence derived from torture. But in May, the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., ruled that while juries could not see that type of evidence, judges could consider it in determining pretrial matters.

Biden administration lawyers were troubled by the decision because they would be expected to defend the use of such information before appeals courts. The ruling, the first known instance in which a military judge permitted prosecutors to use information gained through torture, also carries larger implications for all cases at Guantánamo.

The chief prosecutor at Guantánamo for a decade, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, had cited a statement obtained through torture, clashing with senior administration officials who questioned his authority to do so. The dispute played a part in his unexpected decision to retire from the Army 15 months early, on Sept. 30.

The detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is a Saudi man accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000, which killed 17 sailors.

At issue has been an effort by Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers to learn more about the reasons for a U.S. drone strike in Syria in 2015 that killed another man suspected of being a Qaeda bomber, Mohsen al-Fadhli. Pursuing a possible defense argument, they have sought to determine whether the United States has already killed men it considered to be the masterminds of the Cole bombing.

Prosecutors asked the judge to end that line of inquiry, pointing to a classified cable that reported that Mr. Nashiri had told C.I.A. agents as he was being interrogated at a black site in Afghanistan that Mr. Fadhli had had no involvement.

Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers protested the use of the C.I.A. information and added that the prisoner had made the disclosure as interrogators used a broomstick in a particularly cruel way, causing him to cry out.

The judge has yet to decide the overarching question of whether defense lawyers can continue to seek classified information about the drone attack. But he sided with the prosecutors, ruling that he could consider what Mr. Nashiri had said in deciding the matter. In response, defense lawyers filed an emergency appeal with a higher court, seeking a reversal. Government lawyers have yet to respond.

But Friday, prosecutors asked the judge, Colonel Acosta, to remove from the record information about the C.I.A. interrogation. Still, they asked him to retain the essence of his ruling, which found that there were occasions when a judge could consider such information while recognizing that “statements obtained through torture are necessarily of highly suspect reliability.”

Doing so, they wrote in a six-page filing, “can serve judicial economy” and “advance this case toward trial.” It was signed by General Martins and two other prosecutors.

Defense lawyers called the move insufficient and said they would continue to seek a reversal.

“Removing the sentences citing evidence obtained by torture, but not their motion saying the judge is free to use torture pretrial, or the judge’s ruling saying that it is lawful to do so, accomplishes little,” said Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, Mr. Nashiri’s lead military defense lawyer.

Mr. Nashiri, 56, has been held since 2002, spending four years in C.I.A. custody. His trial had been expected to start in February 2022, but that timetable is in doubt because the coronavirus pandemic has paralyzed progress in the pretrial proceedings at Guantánamo.

The judge has scheduled a two-week hearing in the case starting Sept. 20. The court last convened in January 2020.

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Chief Guantánamo Prosecutor Retiring Earlier than Sept. 11 Trial Begins

Chief Guantánamo Prosecutor Retiring Before Sept. 11 Trial Begins

WASHINGTON – The army general who led a decade of war crimes charges in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is retiring and turning the trial of the five men charged with conspiracy in the September 11, 2001 attacks on a not yet elected successor.

Brig. General Mark S. Martins of the Army served as chief prosecutor for military commissions across the Obama and Trump administrations.

His decision to step down came as a surprise as he had received an extension until January 1, 2023. Instead, he will retire on September 30th, according to a statement from a public prosecutor’s office, Karen V. Loftus, to the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 9/11 attacks.

General Martins, a graduate of Harvard Law School at West Point, had served as the public face of the military commissions for many years. During his early years in office, he ran a public speaking campaign to promote the hybrid form of justice established by the Bush administration after the invasion of Afghanistan.

The Obama administration made some changes to the system and decided to pursue the 9/11 case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accused accomplices in Guantánamo rather than in federal court. A death penalty case that has sunk in pre-trial proceedings since the indictment in May 2011 as the sites deal, among other things, with issues relating to the torture of the defendants in CIA prisons prior to their 2006 transfer to Guantánamo Bay.

Although no military judge is currently assigned to the case, Pentagon officials are preparing for its first hearings since February 2020, due to take place in the first two weeks of September, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the attack.

General Martins filed his annuity papers Wednesday after repeatedly arguing with lawyers from the Biden administration in Guantánamo court over positions of his office on applicable international law and the Convention against Torture, according to senior government officials who knew about the disputes. General Martins did not respond to a request for comment.

A major point of contention was General Martins’ recent decision to give a testimony to the CIA while tortured by a man accused of orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 while he was being tortured to speak to the military judge, who presided over this case to take a stand is also a death sentence. Defense lawyers for prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri from Saudi Arabia are appealing the admissibility of this evidence.

On the same day that General Martins opted to retire, he filed a brief asking the U.S. Court of Justice to review the Military Commission for additional time to respond to the appeal.

“Has he been asked to resign or has he resigned in protest?” Said Navy Capt. Brian L. Mizer, Mr. Nashiri’s senior military defender. “I dont know.”

Ms. Loftus said General Martins had chosen to retire “in the best interests of the ongoing cases”. Military commission hearings are slated to resume next week for the first time since the pandemic began, in a case involving an Iraqi man accused of commanding armed forces that committed war crimes in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004.

Ms. Loftus called the point in time “an ideal window for identifying a successor”, since proceedings “after the pandemic-related break are finally in sight for all of our cases”.

General Martins made an impressive figure in court with a height of six feet and a chest full of medals on his blue army uniform. As a former Rhodes Fellow, he had made it an important part of his job to meet and brief the families of the victims and to connect with some of them through social opportunities in Guantánamo Bay. In an effort to bring the 9/11 case to court, he had repeatedly received extensions of his term.

“My first thought is that only the defendants and family members will be left,” said Joel Shapiro, whose wife Sareve Dukat was killed in the World Trade Center and has since worked as a guide at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York. “Almost everyone else involved in this case took the opportunity to get on with their lives.”

“I was shocked that Mark was stepping down,” said Adele Welty, whose firefighter son Timothy was killed on September 11th. “I thought he was very committed to pulling it off. But who can blame him? The whole Guantánamo enterprise is almost comical in its ridiculous turns – judge after judge step down, and now General Martins. “

Chief Defense Counsel, Brig. General John G. Baker of the Marines, will leave his post on November 1st. The process of replacing him with a new one-star military attorney – to put him on a par with General Martins – was already underway as a potential candidate.

Defense officials said a panel would likely be put together to select a new chief prosecutor who could match the rank of Army Colonel rather than a one-star general. In the meantime, Ms. Loftus said, General Martins’ civilian deputy, Michael J. O’Sullivan, will serve as assistant chief defender.

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Biden Administration Clears three Guantánamo Detainees for Launch

Biden Administration Clears 3 Guantánamo Detainees for Release

The Biden government has approved three detainees in Guantánamo Bay for release to countries that have agreed to impose security conditions on them, including the oldest of the remaining prisoners of war, lawyers and government officials in the United States, said Monday.

The permits increased the number of 40 prisoners currently in war prison who were approved for transfer to other countries to nine. However, it is unclear where the three men will go or when, in part because the State Department will have to make diplomatic and security agreements with countries to accommodate them.

Some of the other detainees who have been released for release over the years have waited a decade for another country to agree to accept them. In some cases, countries are asked to continue detaining detainees or bring them to justice. In most cases, they will be asked to prevent them from traveling abroad for at least two years.

Among those granted permission is Saifullah Paracha, 73, from Pakistan, who was captured in Thailand in 2003. Not only is he the oldest of the inmates, but he has also been referred to as one of the sick with heart disease and diabetes, and high blood pressure.

The other two were Abdul Rabbani, 54, also a Pakistani citizen, and Uthman Abdul al-Rahim Uthman, 40, a Yemeni. None of them have been charged with any crime by the United States in the two decades they have been in custody.

Of the other detainees who remained, 12 were charged with war crimes, one was convicted and 19 are considered too dangerous to be placed in another country’s custody.

The news that the men had been allowed to be released originally came from their lawyers, who heard about it from prisoners in phone calls between lawyer and client. Two government officials upheld the three dismissal decisions, but on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss them.

The decision to approve the three releases was made early last week by the attorney general, the director of the national intelligence service, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the secretaries of defense, homeland security and state. All have representatives who sit on the Periodic Review Board, the organization that assesses the threat posed by the detainees.

Mr. Rabbani was captured during a 2002 security police raid in Karachi, Pakistan, with his brother, who is also held as a prisoner of war in Guantánamo Bay. Both Rabbani brothers were held by the CIA for more than 500 days before being placed in US military custody.

Mr. Uthman was held the longest of the three. He was brought to Guantánamo as a suspected member of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard corps within days of the opening of Camp X-Ray in January 2002. Most recently, he was rejected for release in 2018, also because he “lacked credible plans to support himself during the transfer” and he had not said how his family could support him.

Despite a commitment to renew efforts by the Obama administration to end the detention operations at the naval base in Cuba, the Biden administration has yet to restart renditions. It currently has not appointed a senior US official to negotiate business with other countries.

The Trump administration shut down the office of the Special Envoy for the Closure of Guantánamo and transferred only one prisoner, a seasoned Saudi terrorist who was repatriated in 2018 to serve his war criminal sentence in a former jihadist rehabilitation center.

The last known US rendition of a prisoner from Guantánamo to Pakistan was in 2008. The US stopped repatriating Yemenis in 2010 because it feared that the Yemen government could not monitor the men and prevent them from coming back to join an Al Qaeda franchise there.

Mr. Paracha, a former businessman and long-time legal resident of New York, was captured in July 2003 during an FBI stab operation in Thailand. He was lured from his home in Karachi, Pakistan, to Bangkok to discuss what turned out to be a sham merchandising deal with representatives from Kmart. Instead, secret service agents seized, covered and shackled him and flew him to Afghanistan.

He was viewed by US intelligence as an intermediary who helped the man accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, with financial transactions in Pakistan after the attacks. Both men are charged with conspiring in the September 11th attacks, a capital incident.

Mr Paracha admitted having secured about $ 500,000 for her, but said he was unaware of her identity or her ties to al-Qaeda. He claimed he helped them as he would any other Muslim.

At the time of Mr. Paracha’s capture, his eldest son, Uzair Paracha, was arrested in the United States on suspicion of supporting terrorism. Uzair Paracha was then tried, his conviction overturned, and returned to Pakistan last year in an agreement with prosecutors to drop the case if he gives up his permanent residence status.

Saifullah Paracha’s younger son, Mustafa Paracha, said in an interview last year that his father would like to spend time with his family after his return to Pakistan and that his first concern is to attend to his health needs. At the beginning of his detention, US military doctors flew a cardiac catheterization laboratory and surgical team to Guantánamo, but he refused to consent to the procedure because of concerns about the quality of medical care available there.

Typically, the Periodic Review Secretariat, which manages the Board of Directors, publishes the justifications for the release decisions on its website. The decisions usually contain a recommendation on how to ensure safety and the committee’s recommendations on rehabilitation, repatriation or resettlement of the prisoner who has been admitted for transfer. But it hadn’t done that until Monday evening.

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Army Closes Failing Facility at Guantánamo Bay to Consolidate Prisoners

Military Closes Failing Facility at Guantánamo Bay to Consolidate Prisoners

Major McElwain declined to say how much the consolidation cost. Over time, he said, the move would most likely mean a reduction in the troops of the 1,500 mostly National Guard members, who are mainly on nine-month missions during the detention operation, which is estimated to cost an estimated $ 13 million per prisoner per year.

Mr. Mohammed and the other high-quality inmates were held in classified Camp 7 after they were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. They had spent three to four years in the George W. Bush administration’s secret overseas prison network known as Black Places, where the CIA subjected prisoners to sleep deprivation, forced nudity, waterboarding, and other physical and mental abuse.

By separating the prisoners under the supervision of a special guard called Task Force Platinum, the secret services were able to closely monitor and control their communications and prevent them from revealing what had happened to them. Criminal defense lawyers who were eventually granted access to the men were tied to security clearances to keep their conversations secret, including on court files accusing government agents of state sponsored torture.

Camp 7 has long been one of the most secret sites in Guantánamo. The Pentagon refused to disclose its costs, which contractor built it and when. Reporters were not allowed to see it, lawyers were required to obtain a court order to visit, and its location was deemed classified, despite sources pointing to it on a base satellite map.

In the short term, said Major McElwain, Camp 7 will be “renovated, closed and locked”.

“A plan for its final disposition has yet to be established,” he said.

The former CIA prisoners were largely kept in isolation in Camp 7 in their early years. Each was allowed to talk to only one other prisoner about a tarpaulin during leisure time, in conversations recorded for intelligence purposes.

Her lawyers described the conditions as numbing until the last few years, when commanders allowed prisoners to eat and pray together under strict surveillance. They also had a cell where they could prepare food to pass the time.

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Who Are The Unique 20 Guantánamo Bay Detainees?

Who Are The Original 20 Guantánamo Bay Detainees?

The Obama administration agreed to repatriate Mr. Idris after unusually refusing to challenge his illegal detention request in federal court. He was treated for schizophrenia and other health problems in Guantánamo and later served time in the psychiatric department. After his release he lived essentially as a trapped person, looked after by his family in his home town of Port Sudan, disabled and unable to work. Another former Sudanese prisoner, Sami al-Haj, said he suffered from illnesses related to his torture in Guantánamo. Other early inmates and FBI witnesses reported an early interrogation practice in which some inmates were handcuffed naked in an over-air cell while being verbally abused with loud music and flashing lights to gain their cooperation. He died on February 10th.

Mullah Mazloom, sometimes identified as Mullah Mohammad Fazl, was one of five Taliban members sent to Qatar in exchange for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by the Haqqani militant network in the tribal area of ​​Pakistan’s northwestern border. Mullah Mazloom, a former head of the Taliban army, is accused of playing a role in the Shiite Hazara massacres in Afghanistan, crimes that cannot be brought to justice by a military commission, prior to the 2001 invasion of the United States. In Qatar, he is a member of the Taliban’s negotiating team that drafted an agreement to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and establish a power-sharing agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. He traveled to Pakistan in the summer of 2020 as part of the negotiating team, with the prior consent of the US, Qatar and Pakistani governments.

Mr Wasiq, a deputy secretary of intelligence prior to his arrest in 2001, was also involved in the Bergdahl trade and has joined the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar. His brother-in-law Ghulam Ruhani was repatriated in 2007. Both men were captured after a negotiating meeting with US officials. After his transfer to Doha, where he is staying, Mr. Wasiq also took part in talks with the United States that led to the release of additional Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government under an agreement with the Trump administration the insurgents to stop Taliban attacks on US forces.

Mullah Noori, a provincial governor in Afghanistan, has also joined the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar. Like many expatriates, he and the other four Taliban prisoners traded in for the release of Sergeant Bergdahl live in Doha as guests of the Qatari government. They were accompanied by a family, send their children to a Pakistani school set up for foreign families, and live on a site on government grants. Your ability to travel is regulated by the government of Qatar.

Mr. Shalabi became one of the most famous Saudi prisoners in Guantánamo because of his prolonged hunger strikes, which at times involved force-feeding. After he returned to Saudi Arabia in September 2015, he was immediately jailed for a three-year sentence, which was reduced for “good behavior”. In 2018, he was released after a year or more on a rehabilitation program. He got married and became a father. He has fulfilled the wish that his lawyer asked the Guantánamo Parole Board in April 2015 to “settle down, get married, start a family and leave the past behind”.

According to activists who spoke to the families of Yemenis sent there for resettlement by the Obama administration, Mr. Rahizi, a Yemeni citizen who the United States has concluded cannot be safely repatriated, is locked in a cell in the United Arab Emirates. American officials said the Emirates agreed to set up a resignation program for inmates who could not go home – from prison to a rehabilitation program to jobs in the region that are heavily dependent on foreign labor. That never happened. The London-based project Life After Guantánamo describes imprisonment in the Emirates as grim and threatening, also because the country has considered involuntarily returning former prisoners to Yemen, where they would be in danger.

Mr. Malik, a Yemeni named Abdul Malik al Rahabi, lives in Montenegro, where the United States sent him for resettlement, and tries to sell works of art he painted in Guantánamo. He was joined by his wife and daughter, who found life there to be socially incompatible. The family moved to Khartoum in Sudan. But life was difficult there too and they returned to Montenegro. The art sales stopped some time ago and Mr. Malik’s idea of ​​working as a driver and guide for tourists turned sour when the coronavirus pandemic broke out.

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This is The place The First Guantánamo Detainees Are Now

Here's Where The First Guantánamo Detainees Are Now

Abd al Malik, 41, a Yemeni, was sent to settle in a peaceful nation, Montenegro. After his release in 2016, he received a government grant for some time, but it had expired. He tried to raise money by selling works of art he had made in Guantánamo, but made his last sale last year. The ambition to work there as a driver and guide never materialized when the tourism-dependent economy recovered. And now he, his wife and 20-year-old daughter are isolated and mostly at home because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I don’t know what to do, especially now with Corona,” he said recently. “No work. Nothing.”

Four of the first 20 men, all released by the Bush administration, could not be found.

Gholam Ruhani, 46, and the brother-in-law of one of the Taliban’s negotiators were returned to Afghanistan in 2007. This was the last time his lawyer ever heard from him.

Feroz Abassi was sent to Great Britain in 2005, Omar Rajab Amin to Kuwait in 2006 and David Hicks to Australia in 2007. Everyone is purposely out of sight.

Mr Hicks, 45, an Australian drifter who converted to Islam, was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The only one of the original 20 indicted beyond Mr Bahlul, he went home after pleading guilty of materially supporting terrorism as a Taliban foot soldier a belief that has been overturned.

Ben Saul, a law professor in Sydney, Australia who helped Mr. Hicks in a human rights case in 2016, said when he last heard that Mr. Hicks “works in the landscaped garden and has persistent physical and mental health problems as a result of his US treatment and at Gitmo. “

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Decide Postpones Guantanamo Arraignments Over Covid Considerations

Judge Postpones Guantanamo Arraignments Over Covid Concerns

WASHINGTON – A military judge Tuesday indefinitely postponed indictments against three Guantánamo Bay prisoners who were due to appear in court for the first time after 17 years in prison. The coronavirus pandemic made traveling to the naval base too risky.

Indonesian prisoner Hambali, who has been held as a former leader of a Southeast Asian extremist group since 2003, and two accused accomplices were due to appear before the court martial on February 22nd. But Colonel Charles L. Pritchard Jr., the military judge who was due to travel to Guantanamo this week, ruled that “the various lawyers’ beliefs that travel is a serious threat to their health” was baseline.

Colonel Pritchard is the youngest military judge to join the Bank of Guantánamo Military Commissions and the youngest to postpone a trial deemed too risky in almost a year of the coronavirus repeal. The capital punishment pre-trial hearings against five men charged with planning the September 11, 2001 attacks have been delayed by a year.

The judge, court staff and attorneys in charge of the hearing began quarantine in the Washington area the weekend before a charter flight to the base Thursday.

Once there, the passengers should be quarantined individually for 14 days according to a plan worked out by the public prosecutor’s office in order to protect the residents of 6,000 inhabitants and in prison from the risk of infection.

“The risk to the health and safety of those involved in the legal proceedings due to the global Covid-19 pandemic is high,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order on Tuesday. “The government’s proposed mitigation measures lower the risk, but the risk remains.” He suggested that traveling to the base may not be safe until the end of summer.

Updated

Apr. 2, 2021, 7:52 p.m. ET

The case had been inactive throughout the Trump administration, but on day two of the Biden administration, a senior Pentagon official appointed under the Trump administration in charge of military commissions cleared the prosecution.

The defendants include Mr. Hambali, charged as Encep Nurjaman and the former leader of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah, and his accused accomplices, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, who are Malaysians.

The three men were captured in Thailand in 2003 on charges of conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, and in the 2003 Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing in which at least 11 people were killed and at least 80 injured were indicted for their first three years on the CIA’s secret network of prisoners before being brought to Guantánamo for trial in 2006.

Military commission rules require an inmate to be tried within 30 days of the charges being approved, but the judge’s decision appeared to suspend this watch.

Colonel Pritchard, the head of the Army’s southeastern judicial district, was forced to travel to Washington last week to be quarantined before traveling to Guantánamo. In his decision, he noted that most of the people traveling to the court hearings have not yet been vaccinated against the virus, and neither have the prisoners.

He also noted Saturday’s decision by the Biden government to suspend a plan to offer vaccines to the 40 inmates in the prison this week. Under the original plan, the three defendants could have voluntarily received their February 1 shots and boosters in time for the February 22 trial.

By Tuesday, all soldiers and other service members working on the prison operation had been offered the Moderna vaccine, said Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, an Army spokesman, and declined to say how many of the estimated 1,500 troops are refused to receive this one shot. The Navy’s medical staff has been gradually vaccinating volunteers among residents of the base since Jan. 9.

This week, as part of the tiered program, the vaccines were offered to school teachers and foreign workers of the base commissioner and bars, as well as the naval forces guarding the perimeter of the base.

Prosecutors suggested that the hearing be postponed to April 3. The judge wrote that he would issue a new court order “in due course”.