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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 based mostly on one discovering: a psychological well being board’s analysis 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 analysis was mentioned, each point out of PTSD was blacked out.
It’s the newest instance of a typically baffling pick-and-choose strategy by censors to the general public report that emerges from Guantánamo Bay.
On Sept. 19, reporters, households of victims of the Sept. 11 assaults and a regulation pupil had been all watching the proceedings from the spectators’ gallery at court docket when legal professionals talked about “PTSD” or “post-traumatic stress dysfunction” 9 occasions in two hours.
A court docket 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 court docket, not utilized in U.S. felony courts, to stop the disclosure of labeled data.
However when the Pentagon launched the “unofficial/unauthenticated transcript” on its army commissions web site, solely a secondary analysis 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 report are the work of a shadowy group known as the SCDRT, or the Safety Classification/Declassification Evaluate Workforce. For years, the Pentagon sometimes posted transcripts of public hearings inside 24 hours, typically on the identical day.
However it will probably 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 known as the black websites, the place prisoners had been tortured.
There was no instant clarification for the redactions of PTSD.
David I. Bruck, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyer, has mentioned that his consumer’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 court docket on Friday, Gary D. Sowards, a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed, mentioned the unseen censors had been utilizing redactions “for public relations and tactical issues, 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 must 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 knowledge 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 form of redactions aren’t being made,” he mentioned, noting that the court docket transcripts are dealt with by “a special entity.”
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