Deadlock possible in trial of Guantanamo terror suspect

The first trial of a foreign terror suspect from the Guantanamo detention facility may be deadlocked as a juror on Monday asked the judge if she could be dismissed, saying she felt “attacked” by the other 11 on the panel for being the lone holdout.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan declined to dismiss the juror and ordered the panel to return to deliberations and try to reach a unanimous verdict in the murder and conspiracy trial of alleged Al Qaeda collaborator Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

Ghailani’s monthlong trial on 286 counts of murder, conspiracy and other charges stemmed from the Aug. 7, 1998, terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people and injured thousands.

The case has been watched closely as a test of whether U.S. federal courts are suitable for trying “high-value” terrorism suspects detained at Guantanamo, where military commissions accord the suspects fewer rights than they would have in U.S. civilian courts. The war-crimes tribunal also has a lower threshold for defining what is coerced testimony, allowing confessions or other evidence obtained through harsh interrogation techniques from defendants’ time in U.S. custody at secret prisons abroad.

Kaplan refused to allow testimony against Ghailani by a key government witness after finding that the information was the product of coercive interrogation by CIA agents at an undisclosed foreign detention site. The proposed witness, Hussein Abebe, told government investigators that he sold explosives to Ghailani that were used in the embassy bombing. Kaplan said the government learned of Abebe as a result of torturing Ghailani.

A highly politicized debate has ensued over whether terror suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility should be tried by military commissions there as enemy combatants or brought to U.S. civilian courts to face criminal charges.

Of the 174 prisoners still being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, only one remains indicted on war-crimes charges. Charges filed against about 20 others during the Bush administration were dropped due to rule changes for the military commissions, and new charges have not yet been filed.