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Base brass offered a small trailer to make up for lost space, but the lawyers say no dice, and have asked for yet another postponement of death-penalty trial, currently scheduled to resume Oct. 15 for a five-day hearing of pretrial motions.
9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is facing death, but his trial may be postponed.
WASHINGTON - The lawyers defending 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed smell a rat - and it's not their client.
The ground floor of a building used by the counselors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been declared off-limits due to infestations of mold and rats that have been using the space as a latrine and dropping dead there for months, sickening the personnel.
Base brass offered a small trailer to make up for lost space, but the lawyers say no dice, and have asked for yet another postponement of death-penalty trial, currently scheduled to resume Oct. 15 for a five-day hearing of pretrial motions.
"It does not even have enough chairs, much less work space or computers," said KSM's military defense counsel, Marine Corps Maj. Derek Poteet.
Air Force Col. Karen Mayberry, the Military Commissions' chief defense counsel said that Navy-mandated clean-up of the contaminated space is scheduled to take until Oct. 8.
Prosecutors oppose the delay motion, Poteet said.
The case's latest setbacks happened in August. Scheduled pretrial motion hearings were delayed one day when a Maryland train derailment severed fiber optic Internet lines connecting stateside defense offices to Cuba via satellite.
The next day, Hurricane Isaac turned toward the island, forcing an evacuation of non-essential personnel and the current two-month delay.
In their last turn before a military court in 2008, KSM stated his desire - and his four codefendants' -- to plead guilty to planning and facilitating 9/11.
When President Obama took office the following year, however, Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to move the trial to federal criminal court in New York City.
Congress blocked the move, sending the proceeding back to Guantanamo Bay, where the five defendants were re-arraigned in May.
They each face the death penalty in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. The trial is expected to start no earlier than next year.
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