The judges in both of Guantanamo's death-penalty cases have ordered staff responsible for medical care at the prison's Camp 7 prison to testify at December war court hearings _ in one instance on how much pain an alleged 9/11 plotter suffered after rectal reconstruction surgery.
Such testimony, if held in open court, could provide a window into the health care of the 15 former CIA black site captives at Camp 7, which according to past war court testimony has its own medical team and a clinic.
The first testimony should come the week of Dec. 5 in the Sept. 11 mass murder case. Judge James L. Pohl ordered the detention center to provide the medical staff responsible for an assessment that captive Mustafa al Hawsawi would have no problems attending the hearing.
His lawyer Walter Ruiz, sought a delay, saying the Saudi captive is suffering "excruciating" pain after surgery that repaired his rectum at the Guantanamo base hospital in October. The prosecution opposed the idea, saying medical personnel declared that Hawsawi would be fit for court.
Instead, Ruiz said Sunday, the judge ordered Hawsawi to court with Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other alleged accomplices _ and ordered the senior medical officer as well as other "medical personnel" to testify on the Saudi's postoperative recovery. Pohl, an Army colonel, also ordered the U.S. military to give defense lawyers Hawsawi's medical and prison records since his Oct. 14 surgery, Ruiz said.
'Hawsawi was brutally sodomized, his rectum shredded and his very insides dislodged,' Ruiz said a court filing.
Before Pohl ruled, Ruiz said in a filing that the already slight Hawsawi lost 13 percent of his weight after surgery, was suffering severe pain, constipation, vomiting, nausea, dizziness, sleeplessness and overall weakness. "The prosecution's medical cronies hide behind their anonymity and speak without any accountability through their prosecutorial mouth pieces," he wrote.
In the other capital case, Judge Vance Spath ordered Camp 7's senior medical officer and the prisoner commander or his stand-in to testify the week of Dec. 12 on the question of whether the alleged mastermind of al-Qaida's 2000 bombing of the USS Cole should be allowed to spend nights at the war court compound during hearings.
Attorney Rick Kammen, the death penalty defender for Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, calls the trip between Camp 7 and Camp Justice traumatic for Nashiri because of the captive's "untreated Complex PTSD" _ post-Traumatic stress disorder. It causes him to vomit, the lawyer wrote. The judge has also ordered an MRI study of his brain. But the military has yet to deliver a magnetic resonance imaging machine to Guantanamo.
Nashiri's prosecutors had opposed the request for testimony, accusing Nashiri's lawyers of trying to "rummage through the security protocols" of the prison, "a well-maintained and safe facility."
No trial date has been set in either case. Pretrial issues currently involve what information the former CIA captives, or their lawyers, are entitled to see. Prosecutors have provided a portion of the evidence to the judge, seeking approval of substitutions of the original material.
