Mr Nasiri, 56, is accused of plotting an al Qaeda suicide attack on a warship during a 2000 port visit to Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors died. Along with the attempt to prosecute, he is one of two capital cases in the military commission system. Five detainees were arrested in 2012 for aiding in the September 11 attacks.. Both the cases are pending in the previous hearing.
This was Mr Nasiri’s first court appearance since January 2020. The 39 people currently jailed during the war did not meet with their lawyers and spent the first year or more of the pandemic with limited access to other prisoners and army guards. Outbreaks occur at a remote base of about 6,000 residents.
Pandemic war hinders progress in the court. Proceedings were canceled Wednesday after two prosecutors participating in the case from a courtroom annex in Crystal City, Va., developed symptoms of the coronavirus. The remote courtroom was set up during the pandemic, and all witnesses were being called to testify from there to avoid the need to be sent to Guantanamo for mandatory quarantine two weeks earlier.
Defense lawyers describe a pattern of suspicious listening over confidential attorney-client communications, and call it a government intrusion into their moral duty to defend their work, particularly in the case of the death penalty.
In December 2013, Mr. Nasiri told his lawyers that the cell in which he had been meeting since 2008 was part of a secret CIA prison, where he was held in off-the-book custody in 2003–04. Soon after that conversation, prosecutors responded to an 18-month-old request from Mr. Nasiri’s lawyers for information about the meeting premises. Camp Echo II, as it was called, was used as a black site.
By then, lawyers had learned that the device that looked like a smoke detector in the Camp Echo meeting room was actually a hearing aid. Prosecutors brought military commanders to testify in open court that no one was listening to conversations between the detainees and their lawyers.
Defense lawyers said the use of the black site hurt Mr. Nasiri again as he was tortured while being detained by the CIA in 2002-06. In response, Mr. Nasiri and his lawyers were handed two hidden microphones in a separate meeting place, Camp Delta.