The Clipboard: Guantanamo 'spy ring' case takes big hit

From an article¹:

Military prosecutors who accused an Air Force translator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of taking part in a spy ring that tried to pass more than 200 secret documents to U.S. enemies now say that only one of the documents was secret, the Air Force said Tuesday.

The prosecutors' move, six months after the collapse of a case against a Muslim chaplain in the same probe, is fueling questions about whether there ever was a spy ring at Guantanamo.

A court-martial against Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi is still scheduled in California on Tuesday. He faces 16 counts — including attempted espionage, lying to investigators and disobeying orders — and could face life in prison. But the prosecutors' concession has led Al Halabi's lawyers to call for some counts to be dismissed, and military law specialists say it has stripped much of the backbone from the charges.

“This case is gone,” said Eugene Fidell, a military law specialist who represented Army Capt. James Yee, the chaplain who was threatened with execution before espionage charges were dropped against him. “There's no ring and no spies. … It suggests people didn't do the kind of homework they should have done.” (link)

Here we go again.

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Complete text of the article, Guantanamo ‘spy ring' case takes big hit, by Laura Parker

Military prosecutors who accused an Air Force translator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of taking part in a spy ring that tried to pass more than 200 secret documents to U.S. enemies now say that only one of the documents was secret, the Air Force said Tuesday.

The prosecutors' move, six months after the collapse of a case against a Muslim chaplain in the same probe, is fueling questions about whether there ever was a spy ring at Guantanamo.

A court-martial against Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi is still scheduled in California on Tuesday. He faces 16 counts — including attempted espionage, lying to investigators and disobeying orders — and could face life in prison. But the prosecutors' concession has led Al Halabi's lawyers to call for some counts to be dismissed, and military law specialists say it has stripped much of the backbone from the charges.

“This case is gone,” said Eugene Fidell, a military law specialist who represented Army Capt. James Yee, the chaplain who was threatened with execution before espionage charges were dropped against him. “There's no ring and no spies. … It suggests people didn't do the kind of homework they should have done.”

Lawyers for Al Halabi, who was arrested in July 2003, have argued that the hundreds of pages of documents he had — mostly letters from detainees at the camp for suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives — shouldn't have been designated as secret. The Air Force said Tuesday that military and security experts have determined most documents in the case “are considered ‘For Official Use Only,' but are not classified. Of these documents, one is considered classified at the ‘Secret' level. This document relates to some … of the charges.”

Al Halabi, a Syrian native and naturalized U.S. citizen, was jailed for 10 months before he was released in May. He is restricted to Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, where he is stationed. When he was arrested, he had 186 letters in his laptop computer and two handwritten notes, all from prisoners. Agents later intercepted a box he had mailed to his Travis address. A document found in the box is still considered classified.

Prosecutors have said Al Halabi intended to go to Syria, possibly to pass documents to U.S. enemies. Al Halabi's lawyers say he was going there, but only to get married. They say he had the documents as part of his work as a translator.

Al Halabi's lawyers also say Al Halabi and Yee were charged after complaining about how detainees were treated.

reference=http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20040908/1a_bottomstrip08_dom.art.htm