This 9/11 case is the biggest criminal trial in US history.
I would venture to say it's one of the biggest criminal trials in all of history.
And to be honest I don't know how exactly it's gonna work, we were talking through it yesterday
in team meeting yesterday evening and, you know, we just don't ... There is no real protocol for this,
it never happened before, so ... And it's not easy. Excuse me one minute.
The national [anthem] makes me just a little bit upset, that they play it right before we go in the court room
to hear the government talk about why the constitution doesn't apply here.
And that's really the only thing I can think of every time they play the national anthem, an idiom here.
I really love here but it's so incongruous with the rest of this place.
Good afternoon, my name is James Connell and along with Lt Col Sterling Thomas of the United States Air Force
and Alka Pradhan, we are the attorneys for Ammar al-Baluchi.
There is a position at the Department of Defence wherein I get paid to stand up and point out
what the Department of Defence is doing wrong.
We're sort of the red-headed stepchild of the Department of Defence.
It's our role, under the office of secretary of defence, to provide legal representation services to
men who are charged or have identified as possibly will be charged in the Notary Commissions
at Guantanamo Bay.
We represent Ammar al-Baluchi. His uncle Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was considered to be
the leader behind the 9/11 attacks.
But the biggest charge against him is that, in the conspiracy that led up to the attacks,
he was given some money, somebody called him and asked for that money and he wired the money to that person.
Guantanamo occupies a strange space in American jurisprudence, which is why it was selected.
It was the legal equivalent of outer space in thinking of the Bush administration.
It's considered extraterritorial to many of the laws of the United States.
So we asked what provisions of the Constitution apply here in Guantanamo
and we got sort of a 'wait and see'.
We'll decide that as each issue arises, which is quite a challenge.
OK guys, we have about three days before the next hearing so this is our possibility
to talk about some of the strategic goals we have.
Our projection on our team timeline is for a 2020 trial.
One of the ways that I try to run the team is let goals be organising principles
instead of goal post that we might or might not meet.
About 10 years ago in my capital practice we lost all the time
and at the end of losing often our clients got executed.
And so, if our personal satisfaction came from accomplishing goals, like saving people's lives
and winning motions, then we were gonna burn out awfully fast.
And then we would not be helping anybody.
So, what we can do is beautiful work today and outcomes will forward in May.
It is a unique position to be a uniformed officer whose job is to take on the government.
You have to let go of all your presumptions about how the government is going to be above board
about what they are doing or how they are going to practice in this particularly important trial.
I am an act duty military officer, I was given the mission in 2010 to defend detainees at Guantanamo
and so doing today I am speaking on behalf of my client Mr Ammar al-Baluchi.
He suffered unspeakable torture.
For many of you, who watch this sort of movie, perhaps you've seen Zero Dark Thirty.
The person who is depicted in the first 25 minutes of that movie is my client, Ammar.
They own you more.
He was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.
Look at me.
And transferred to CIA custody shortly thereafter.
Look at me, Ammar.
He was shackled for months at the time in stress positions.
He was subjected to sexual humiliation, he was made to stand for days at a time.
He was beaten brutally.
He was tortured with water.
We asked how did the director of Zero Dark Thirty get all this information and received in discovery
that she had access to CIA records.
But we're denied because they say it is not relevant.
A movie director gets greater access than a defence council.
That's the kind of thing that's happening in our 9/11 workload.
This is a death penalty trial and we're supposed to be entitled to every scrap of evidence
that could be material to the case.
Everywhere we go we're looking for information that we have not got from the US government,
like where they may have been held. I wish the government has said, absolutely flag out,
they consider to be classified and they will never tell us.
That's sort of crucial to the case.
For years, everything that Ammar said was classified, you know.
If he said 'Excuse me, can I go to the restaurant?' that was classified.
That was exceptionally complicated. One of the few things that we've sort of won
in the case is having that system rolled back and so now his ordinary day-to-day communications
are not classified. But even now anything that he wants to say
about his time in black sites, we have to have it reviewed for classification.
That's just one example of the self-inflicted wounds that the United States government
imposes on itself and the people who work for it. They make things super complicated.
Personally, I'd like to see this move a little quicker but it is a powerful thing for myself to come down
here and witness it, to see it, to see it in action, how slow the action might be sometimes.
Each time at Guantanamo we extend invitation to victims family members who are there to observe
the proceedings and I see my role as to not deflect their pain but to accept and absorb their pain,
to make myself vulnerable to what they're feeling.
Some of the things that the defence argues, they've argued before and why is it that we have a space
in this world, in our United States, that they can do that?
I can never experience what they've experienced but to have someone listen to them,
which is what I try to do, is often, I think, helpful.
The fact that we are spending two years or more developing the process for this is quite irritating from my perspective
and I am sure other people feel the same way, it's ... I might say it is an open and close case,
but is there a better way to figure out what the process should be than having
defence lawyers and prosecution lawyers arguing that out point by point?
I don't think this is going to be resolved in my lifetime.
Where we are in the proceedings currently is the pre-trial phase, which we have been in now for many years.
When I took the job, I had a position not to exceed 18 months. That was in summer of 2011,
I thought the case was gonna be in trial by September 11th of 2012,
but everything about that turned out to be wrong.
Part of the reason pre-trial litigation is taking so long is the government keeps interfering
with its own prosecution, mostly by intrusions into the defence teams.
For four and a half years, the government has illegally reviewed our attorney-client privileged communications.
They tried to place an informant on one of the defence teams, they have put listening devices
in our meeting rooms.
The small detectors which were oddly placed right next to the table where you had to sit
to talk to your client ... Along the ceiling, where the smoke alarms go,
were in fact sound detection devices.
Every discovery request comes back denied, every request for a witness is denied.
And so every day we try to just chip away a little bit more at this crazy institution that the government has built.
Usually we do this in India when we go to temples and stuff, so this part I am used to, but the
the problem is I use my hands too much when I talk, always in danger of it falling off.
I am not Muslim, but I do wear a hijab in the courtroom because these guys were all tortured pretty badly
and in some cases by females, so wearing the hijab is just kind of a mark of respect
when you are trying to build a trust relationship.
Little things like that could be helpful to the case.
We're cooking for the guys who come for the trial this morning for the military commission.
It's the second day of military commission so none will be asked to come but if they want to come,
then we provide the breakfast and the lunch for them.
It's for my client and for the other clients too.
We basically take turns, yesterday it was al-Hawsawi day to provide breakfast and lunch, today it is the al-Baluchi day
to provide breakfast and lunch, tomorrow it will be something else.
This is za'atar, it's basically the ordinary breakfast in the Middle East.
Any time we visit them in the camps we have to work with whatever the camp provides us,
but in the courtroom there is all flexibility, so you can provide them some things that
have a little close taste to home.
So I've done this a few times for Ammar and he seems to appreciate it.
He likes to take the za'atar and deep it in egg yolk.
You know, when I took criminal decisions, they didn't cover this, this was not in the syllabus.
But I've always appreciated the JTF (Joint Task Force) let's us do it. Yes, it helps them, which helps those situations
go more smoothly. It also encourages them to come to court which the prosecutions wants,
the compelling numbers they want, media wants, everybody wants.
I've had a lot of experience in capital litigation, a lot of criminal defence experience,
but ironically I use almost none of that in my current job.
In many ways sheer difficulty of the legal construct here is what attracted me to getting involved in the case.
Lots of people in the government feel that they should cut corners because such a heinous crime
is being committed, but to me it seemed like the place of greatest need and so that's why I wanted to go there.
It is essentially the question of: "Would you rather criticise a process from the outside or fight against it
from the inside?" And I am a "fight against it from the inside" kind of person.
Certain people feel like we're legitimising their system, but there would be no one to point out that
all of those values that we violated post September 11th continue to be violated sixteen years later.
And these men will be held indefinitely without anyone to present their side of it.
This is not going to win me a popularity contest, but it's the right thing to do
because there are these issues with this military commission and these laws that allow us
to treat these men differently than we would treat others.
We need to challenge that.
There is a way of prosecuting acts of terror, there is a way of obtaining justice for our client
but this is not the way of doing it.
We're far beyond any point where we can actually have a real trial.
Just from the difficulty in getting down here and getting access to anything valued down here,
the government at every juncture tries to stop public access to this trial and they're succeeding,
I mean they're winning.
This is the biggest criminal trial in US history.
So it is so frustrating to me how few people are watching what's happening down here.