GUANTANAMO
Lawyers duel over evidence in Sudanese terror case

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BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The U.S. military in Afghanistan kept no medical records on a Sudanese suspect who was captured in a March 2002 raid on an al Qaeda safehouse, a Marine prosecutor said Wednesday.
At the time the White House hailed the results of the raid a major U.S. breakthrough in the war on terror.
Marine Maj. James Weirick, the prosecutor, made the disclosure about medical records in a pretrial hearing for long-held suspected terror trainer Noor Uthman Mohammed on pointed questioning from the case's military judge, Navy Capt. Moira Modzelewski.
Noor, in his 40s, was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, in a raid that netted reputed arch-terrorist "Abu Zubaydah,'' near death from bullet wounds and diverted to CIA custody where, according to leaked reports, he was saved by heroic efforts of U.S. doctors.
In contrast, the prosecutor said in court that there was no record of treatment of Noor across 125 days of custody in Pakistan and the U.S. interrogation outpost at Bagram, Afghanistan.
He arrived at Guantánamo in August 2002, and was charged this January with conspiring with al Qaeda and supporting terror as an alleged foot soldier and sometime AK-47 and other weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Lawyers Wednesday were dueling over what evidence the defense might be able to examine before a proposed trial next year by military commission. A conviction could carry life in prison.
Weirick announced that about 1,700 pages of documents were being tested at the FBI crime labs in Quantico, Va., and consisted of about a third of the government's evidence against the man.
U.S. military investigators found no records of what medical treatment, if any, he received in Bagram, a major U.S. intelligence collection and detention site for the interrogation of captives, which has been the target of a series of military abuse investigations. Noor was held there for months.
Judge: You believe they didn't maintain medical records at Bagram?
Weirick: That's correct, your honor.
The judge urged the Marine prosecutor to go back to the government's "equity partners'' -- frequently used shorthand here for the CIA and other intelligence agencies -- "to speed up and ensure rapid and full discovery'' of evidence that could either help or hurt the Noor defense team.
Modzelewski, the judge, declared herself surprised at the volume of documents the government planned to use at a military trial, if the Obama administration chooses to go forward with it, and scheduled the next hearing in the case at Guantánamo on Jan. 13, nine days before President Barack Obama's deadline for the detention center's closure.
Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn Abdeen al Husseini, arrived here in September 2006 and has been held at a secretive, off-limits prison camp for former CIA captives. Several other men captured in the same raid were moved here in 2002, like Noor, and the Pentagon prosecutor has indicated he intends to charge them with war crimes as well.
Fitzgibbons, the Sudanese captive's Pentagon-appointed defense counsel, expressed frustration at the slow pace of disclosure of evidence ahead of the proposed trial. Noor, she said, "has been sitting in that cell for seven years and seven months'' and lawyers and their investigators are now "looking back and trying to reconstruct something that should've been done before.''
"Witnesses are being released from here, witnesses are dying,'' she added, without explanation.
The Defense Department last month repatriated a Yemeni, Alla Ali Ahmed, who was captured in the same raid as Noor and Abu Zubaydah. A federal judge ordered his release in August, ruling that the Pentagon's mosaic of evidence against him did not prove Ahmed could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant.
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