Human rights advocates condemned the legal system the Bush administration constructed after the September 11 attacks to try those charged with crimes. Defense lawyers say much of the evidence against their clients may have been extracted through coercion.
HILLTOP COURTHOUSE
Hamdan was being tried in a hilltop courthouse overlooking Guantanamo Bay by a jury selected from a pool of 13 U.S. military officers flown in from around the world.
The final jury includes two Army lieutenant colonels, an Army colonel, a Navy captain, an Air Force colonel and a Marine lieutenant colonel. Allred ordered their identities kept secret.
During questioning of the prospective jurors, the judge asked if they would have any bias against Hamdan because he was Arab, Muslim or Yemeni. All said no.
One prospective juror who was eliminated, a Navy captain and former policeman, said he knew the commander of the USS Cole, which was struck by a suicide bombing in 2000 in a Yemeni port, killing 17 American sailors. "No one wants to see shipmates hurt and killed. It angered me," he said.
Another was excused because he knew a prosecution witness.
One officer accepted for the panel was a helicopter pilot who said he had served in Panama, Iraq and Kosovo. Another was an Army officer who said he believed the war on terrorism had started in the 1990s, not after the September 11 attacks.
He said he worked in operations analysis and had seen classified reports on radical Islam. "Radical Islam exists and I believe we are at war with it," he said.
In a ruling issued on the first day of trial, Allred threw out Hamdan's statements to interrogators at Bagram air field and the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan due to the "highly coercive ... conditions under which they were made."
But he allowed some other statements as evidence and ruled that there were "no coercive techniques" used to influence any of his statements at Guantanamo. Hamdan's lawyers say their client was subjected to isolation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation at the prison camp.
