US News

Ex-Guantanamo detainee gets court-appointed lawyer

Jun 16, 2009, 16:56 GMT

New York - Former Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Ghailani received a court-appointed lawyer at a hearing in a US district court in New York Tuesday. He told Judge Lewis Kaplan he cannot afford a civilian attorney and would also need a translator. Ghailani is the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to appear in a US federal court on criminal charges and has pleaded not guilty in connection to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ghailani had already been indicted in the killings of 224 people. He now faces a total of 286 criminal counts, including conspiring with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to kill Americans anywhere in the world. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, or possible execution. The Tanzanian-born suspect was taken to the court in lower Manhattan, dressed in black overalls over his dark orange prison garb, for a court session lasting about an hour. Kaplan said he wanted to clarify some administrative matters before he set a schedule for future court appearances and a trial, the length of which will depend on whether the prosecution decides to seek the death penalty. The judge set the next hearing for July 2. Ghailani shook his head when Kaplan asked whether he could speak English fluently. But he said through an attorney that he understood what the judge said. Kaplan appointed Attorney Greg Cooper to lead the defense team in response to Ghailani's statement that he does not have the money to pay for his own legal team. He also instructed Cooper to seek information from the US Defense Department on the Ghailani case in the two weeks before the next hearing. Cooper protested, saying he would not have enough time to go through 900 boxes of documents accumulated in Guantanamo, 90 per cent of which require a government security clearance in order to read. Cooper does not have that security clearance. Present in the hushed court room were Colonel Jeffrey Colwell and Lieutenant Colonel Richard Reiter, the military lawyers who defended Ghailani in Guantanamo. Both have not received authorization from the Pentagon to continue their work in a civilian court, but said they would seek an authorization. Ghailani first appeared before the federal court last week, pleading not guilty to 286 counts related to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and denying he belonged to the al-Qaeda network. Ghailani was captured in Pakistan in 2004 and detained at a secret location by the US Central Intelligence Agency before he was sent to Guantanamo in September 2006.