GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba _ All five accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks chose not to attend a session of court Friday to capture testimony from an elderly man who lost his family in the worst terror attack in history on U.S. soil.
In the first such testimony of the case, Lee Hanson, 84, of Connecticut, was set to describe what he learned that day in a phone call from his son Peter, who was aboard the hijacked United 175, and then saw on television as the aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center.
Lee Hanson's daughter-in-law, Sue, and 2-year-old granddaughter were also on board. Christine Hanson is the youngest victim of the attacks that claimed 2,976 lives.
Five men accused of directing, helping finance, and doing training for the attack are in pretrial hearings. No start date has been set. Their judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, gave the accused the prerogative of voluntarily waiving attendance at the testimony.
Multiple sources at the war court compound said none chose to attend.
At the earliest, lawyers could start selecting a U.S. military jury to hear the case in March 2018. Meantime, the military judge is essentially creating time-capsule testimony _ in words and video _ that could be screened or recited at the death-penalty trial and, if any man is convicted, during a sentencing phase.
Prosecutors have sought the depositions in case some of their elderly or sick witnesses pass away before trial.
It was to be the first Sept. 11 pretrial session in which the accused could attend but the public could not watch. A consortium of news organizations, including the Miami Herald and parent company McClatchy, asked Pohl to open the deposition to the public and lost.
Typically, a military attorney from the secret Camp 7 prison that houses former CIA captives testifies in court on whether the five men voluntarily waived attendance. But that portion of Friday's hearing was closed to the public, too.
Hanson's testimony is clouded by the absence this week of one of the defendants' death-penalty defenders, Cheryl Bormann. She fell and broke her arm virtually on the eve of travel to the hearing, requiring surgery. Each of the accused is entitled by law to a learned counsel, a lawyer who specializes in defending a client in capital punishment cases.
The judge made clear in court Wednesday that, by going forward without Bormann, prosecutors were taking "a risk" that Hanson's testimony might be disqualified from use at the trial against one or all five accused terrorists under what he called a "Bruton analysis."
