About Guantanamo Bay detainee Noor Uthman Mohammed and attorney Vaughn A. Ary with excellent coverage by the Miami Herald throughout the years! Of course it will never happen a US general before the ICC in The Hague, well at least the AG got him for a sex linked military offense. What a bs America, you can do better.
Pentagon throws out foot soldier’s Guantánamo war court conviction
WASHINGTON — A retired Marine general responsible for the Guantánamo war court has overturned the terror conviction through plea bargain of a Sudanese man who was sent home a little over a year ago as a war criminal, the Pentagon disclosed Friday.
In 2011, Noor Uthman Mohammed pleaded guilty to providing material support for terror in in exchange for his potential testimony against other captives and certain release from Guantánamo.
He admitted to being a small-arms and artillery weapons instructor at an Afghan training camp in the ’90s, and was repatriated in December 2013. He is now 53, and little is known about what became of him.
Friday, a Pentagon announcement said the Convening Authority for Military Commissions, a job currently held by retired Marine Maj. Gen. Vaughn A. Ary, threw out the case “in the interests of justice and under the rule of law.”
Civilian courts have ruled that providing material support for terror was not a legitimate war crime for actions that occurred before the adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It was adopted by Congress during the Bush administration to try to prosecute accused war criminals of al-Qaida captured after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Noor got to Guantánamo in May 2002 and went home without ever testifying at any war crimes trial.
It was the job of Ary’s office to approve the record. Instead he “disapproved” the “findings and sentence,” the Pentagon said. It did not release the underlying documents that Ary signed.
Noor was was among the few foot soldier cases the Pentagon chose to prosecute at Guantánamo, and may have chosen him because of the company he kept.
Pakistani security forces picked him up in Faisalabad, Pakistan, after the 9/11 attacks at the same safe house as a prized war-on-terror captive, Zayn Abdeen al Hussain — better known as Abu Zubaydah, who would be waterboarded 83 times by the CIA in a bid to break him.
Quilt by asssociation
A prosecutor screened a video of an anti-American rant by Abu Zubaydah at Noor’s sentencing hearing to argue guilt by association in setting his punishment.
Torture at Bagram prison
Defense lawyers countered with Noor’s account of the way U.S. troops treated him at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan prior to his August 2002 transfer to Guantánamo — painful shackling, blasts of hot and cold, deafening music and being left naked in sight of female soldiers.
- ○ Guantanamo’s Simulacrum of Justice by Laura Ritter of HRW
