DISHONOR BOUND

Two New Motions Filed in USAF v. Al Halabi

by Charles Gittings

April 23, 2004 (PEGC) -- Two new motions were filed by attorneys for Senior
Airman Ahmad Al Halabi at Travis AFB on Friday, April 16th. Donald Rehkopf, who
is Al Halabi's civilian attorney and who is also Counsel of Record on my Hamdi
amicus brief, has kindly allowed me access to those motions, and given me
permission to "quote liberally".

What follows will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Yee travesty,
and looking through this stuff, it seems likely this case is heading for a quick
flush down the same toilet. The facts are a tangled mess of technical details,
but the broad outlines are clear enough.

The first motion is to compel discovery, following up on a previous order the
court issued on March 26th. The gist of it is simple:

    "The Defense maintains the Government has been completely derelict in its
    discovery duties, even in spite of court orders to provide such. This motion
    only covers selected portions of deficient discovery, and should not be
    construed as addressing all aspects of discovery failures, which are
    legion..."


The second motion asks the court to find the prosecutors in violation of the
court's previous order, order immediate discovery, sanction the prosecutors, and
grant whatever other relief may be required.

Yup, you guessed it: the prosecutors are STILL stonewalling the defense. What a
surprise, huh?

The motions focus on charges and evidence related to computer use. A key detail:

    "[N]one of the specifications alleging use of the Internet to commit an
    offense stand today."


All such specifications were either not charged or dropped. The major focus is
on (surprise again!) the withholding, mishandling, and misrepresentation of
evidence, specifically evidence relating to SrA Al Halabi's laptop computer,
which was seized when he was arrested (and surreptitiously searched just prior).

This I take it is the major evidence for the government's supposed "case," and
needless to say, the defense wants discovery on every last bit of information
the government has. Now that could be quite a large amount of data here, since
we are talking about a modern hard drive plus logs from Yahoo! and such. One of
the government investigators testified that he spent 800 hours analyzing the
hard drive, the case was supposed to start trial back in November, the defense
had a right to the information then, and the judge explicitly ordered the
prosecutors to turn everything over in March -- yet:

    "Despite a court-order to produce all information, notes and documents
    obtained or maintained or created by [the investigators] in the analysis of
    the laptop computer, [the prosecution] has only bothered to turn over a 42-
    page report and a CD-ROM with only 127 megabytes of data."


Then there's SrA Al Halabi's web page, which you can see for yourself at:

    http://www.geocities.com/ahmad564/index.html


[ Incidentally, it's been reported that Al Halabi worked for Yee at Gitmo at
least part of the time he was there, but if you look at his pictures from Gitmo
it's quite obvious they're good friends as well. ]

The prosecution has claimed that SrA Al Halabi tried to modify a page on that
site while working with a computer under the supervision of defense counsel to
prepare his defense. That allegation was used to justify a raid on the military
defense counsels' office to search their computers:

    "[Investigators and prosecutors] have steadfastly maintained that SrA Al
    Halabi made substantial changes to his 'webpage' on 16 September 2003, based
    upon the allegation SrA Al Halabi deleted three images and uploaded five new
    ones. [They] have never indicated they possessed evidence to the contrary.
    They have never even implied the contrary might be true. In fact, [the
    prosecutors] used the allegation ... to justify continuing pre- trial
    confinement. [They] have also used the allegation to justify extensive,
    intrusive and unwarranted searching of Defense computers by so arguing
    against the Defense-requested protective order to stop just such searches.
    The 'true' facts are that the Government knew or at least had the factual
    capacity to know, all along that this accusation simply is not true."


But here's the kicker:

    "Once the Government decided to finally provide the Defense with what little
    evidence it did pertaining to the laptop, the Defense was able to ascertain
    in a matter of minutes, that Government assertions the "website" changed as
    alleged on 16 September 2004 are entirely false. Likewise, the [prosecution]
    argument to this Court, in opposition to the Defense Motion for Protective
    Order to prevent further search of the defense computer and in opposition to
    releasing SrA Al Halabi from pre-trial confinement, was based upon false
    testimony..."


And it just goes on and on and on. If it was movie, it would be something like:

        The Three Stooges, starring in... "Counter-Intelligence".


I keep adding up the little we know, and it keeps adding up the same: this is no
espionage case, this is a frame, a cover-up, and a whole lot of CYA -- and a
pretty lame example at that.

It's also a rather disturbing reflection on US military CI -- and on MG Miller,
the former commander of JTF-GTMO. I take it he wanted to make examples of Yee
and Al Halabi, but all I know for sure is that I still want this nonsense
investigated all the way up the chain of command.

* * *

Charles Gittings
Oakland, California

cbgittings@sbcglobal.net

+1-510-923-1688

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