The military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay are facing chaos after a trial judge sentenced the chief defence counsel, a marine general, to 21 days’ confinement in his trailer for contempt.
The uproar came on the same day Republican senators called for the suspect in Wednesday’s New York truck attack to be sent to the detention camp on a US enclave in Cuba, and Donald Trump said he would certainly consider the idea. His administration has already said it may start sending new inmates to the camp, which was set up in 2001 to try terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
In court on Wednesday, Marine Brigadier General John Baker, who oversees defence teams at the facility, attempted to argue the court had no jurisdiction over him. But Air Force Colonel Vance Spath, the judge in the case about the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, refused to let him speak and ordered him to sit down, according to the Miami Herald.
Spath declared Baker in contempt for excusing three civilian defence lawyers from the case because of an unspecified ethics conflict involving attorney-client privilege. Spath ordered the general confined to his quarters in a trailer near the court and to pay a $1,000 fine.
Spath ordered the civilian lawyers to return to Guantánamo Bay or appear by video-link next week.
The defendant in the USS Cole case, a Saudi national, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has asked the US district court in Washington to halt the trial because the only defence attorney left at the trial is a navy lieutenant who graduated five years ago and has never tried a murder case. Nashiri is facing a potential death sentence.
“The USS Cole is a proxy for much larger issues that have not been settled yet, and which should to be resolved by another court some distance from Guantánamo,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. He added that among those unresolved questions are who can decide when and whether civilian lawyers can withdraw from a trial and whether the court has the power to confine a lawyer who is a US citizen.
Vladeck, who is co-editor of the website Just Security, said that another unsettled question is whether the New York suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant who was legally settled in the US, could be designated an enemy combatant and sent to Guantánamo.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said on Wednesday: “I believe we would consider the suspect to be an enemy combatant, yes.”
However, an unnamed administration official was quoted by NBC News as saying there was likely to be no legal authority to send Saipov to Guantánamo Bay.
On Wednesday evening it was reported that a federal court in Manhattan would be charging Saipov.
All but 10 of the 41 men still at the prison are being held in indefinite detention without trial, and five have gone on hunger strike. In recent weeks, the military authorities have taken a tougher line on the strikers, allowing them to deteriorate significantly before force-feeding them.
