GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Lawyers for the five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators formally asked their trial judge on Monday to postpone a June 5 arraignment -- seeking more time to build attorney-client relationships with the alleged architects of the Sept. 11 attacks.
There was no immediate word from the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, on whether an extension of time would be granted.
Unless Kohlmann grants a delay, some 60 journalists plus other international observers are expected to descend on this base in southeast Cuba next month to see, for the first time, the men the Pentagon wants to try for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed 2,973 people.
Defense lawyers have argued that their preparation of the case has moved at a snail's pace. Security clearances have been slow in coming. Flights are infrequent, and unreliable.
And the defense lawyers, who meet their clients in their U.S. military uniforms, are still trying to build relationships with the alleged al Qaeda terrorists, none of whom ever saw a lawyer across years of secret CIA custody and interrogation somewhere overseas.
''It is reasonable to expect that the accused has an inherent distrust of all U.S. military personnel,'' wrote two Navy attorneys who have been assigned to defend Ramzi bin al Shibh, a Yemeni who allegedly organized some of the 9/11 suicide squads from Hamburg, Germany.
Like the other four men charged in the case, Bin al Shibh is charged with a complex, overarching conspiracy that seeks the death penalty as the ultimate punishment for helping orchestrate the suicide attacks that struck the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field nearly seven years ago.
Each of the five filed separate requests for delay; none were known to have proposed an alternative to June 5 -- the date Kohlmann set last week, after assigning himself to personally preside over the commission case.
Kohlmann had set Monday as a deadline for attorneys to seek delays, and explain why.
Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier and Lt. Richard Federico, Bin al Shibh's lawyers, argued that they so far have no Top Secret work space at this remote base and have met their client only three times, not enough time, they say, to build a relationship.
Besides, they said, the Pentagon has yet to grant a security clearance for their proposed civilian co-counsel -- Chicago criminal defense attorney Tom Durkin.
Nor have the lawyers seen any evidence against their client, they wrote in a six-page motion for ``special relief.''
''The defense has no understanding of the volume of evidence or scope of legal issues that may be germane to this case,'' wrote Lachelier and Federico. ``Under these conditions, it would be impossible for the defense to come to any realistic agreement about a trial schedule at the time of arraignment.''
At issue, in part, is whether and under what circumstances Kohlmann, the chief military commission judge, will stop a 120-day speedy-trial clock created by Congress to hurry the pace of prosecutions.
Under the clock, prosecutors get 30 days after the charges are translated and delivered to the detainees to arraign the men -- bring them to the war court, ask them if they accept their Pentagon lawyers and then formally read them the charges.
Then the trial should start within 120 days of their delivery. Only the defense lawyers have the power to stop the clock, if they can argue it is in their clients' best interests.
The lawyer for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the reputed 9/11 architect, had earlier noted that while the charges themselves were formally approved on a Friday, May 9, they were not released to lawyers until after the close of business the following Monday -- reason enough to grant a delay.
